Galaxy Nexus Dock Mod

So I wanted a dock for my Galaxy Nexus, but Samsung in there infinite wisdom decided that releasing a dock along with the phone would be far too convenient for the consumer and instead decided to hold it off indefinitely.  Undeterred, I went looking for a suitable 3rd party replacement.  There weren't any.  damn.  Well I guess I'd have to resort to some hackery to get my way.

Parts:
Samsung Fascinate Dock

The Build:
The first thing you have to do is disassemble the dock.  I managed to mangle this dock pretty badly trying to do that, but the trick with Samsung docks is to pry the back panel of first, then the screws and finally pop off the front.  You'll end up with three pieces.

We are concerned primarily with the front piece.  Remove all the wires and get the front piece by itself.  Now, break out a small file, a knife, some wire cutter and whatever other sharp implements you may want.  I then start cutting away all the excess plastic above the original USB plug, as we need to move the plug up and forward in order to accommodate the taller and thicker GN.  I actually ended up cutting away the plastic around the plug entirely as I found that the plug was too thick to be able to leave everything in place.

As you can see, I cut a new notch for the USB plug as well as took off all the material around it.  Now do a test fit.  if you find everything fitting nicely then tack the plug into place with some superglue.  Do this CAREFULLY with the phone still in place in order to make sure that everything fits once dried.  Once this dries, remove the phone, and reinforce the area with more superglue or epoxy.  The end result should look something like this:

As you can see I filed down the plug a bit.  This was not necessary, but I did it because I was trying to avoid cutting the front of the dock.  Before reassembling everything plug the dock and the phone in and verify that it still in fact works.  Now reassemble.  Congrats!  You have a Galaxy Nexus multimedia dock!  The only issue I'm currently running into is that the line out via USB is not working.  I'm not sure if this is a dock issue (resistor value wrong for the ID pin) or if its a phone/ROM issue.  FYI the Fascinate dock ID resistor value is 365k.

The finished dock:

Have fun and happy modding!

PX100 Headphone Repair

So my pair of PX100's finally broke.  I've had them for a couple years, and now that finding a good replacement is getting difficult I decided to just repair the cord.  This looked to be an easy task, but as with any piece of manufactured electronics, there's always something sticky in the way.

In my case, that something sticky was a whole ton of glue holding the front and back of the each ear piece together.  There were what looked to be 4 blobs when in reality the entire ring was glued down.  This meant that to disassemble the headphone I had to break the plastic ring in order to cut away the glue at the inside.  Not pretty, but I eventually had the two halves separated.

Rewiring had its own issues.  The original wire was held in place by a plastic stop.  However, this stop was molded directly over the wire, and more importantly over a knot in the wire.  This stop however is molded to fit the headphones and so I wanted to keep it intact when I actually removed the wire.  I ended up actually drilling the wire out and then prying the remaining bits (including the knot) out with a screwdriver, which left me with a clean stop to thread the cord though.

After the wire was heatshrunk in place, it was a relatively simple matter of soldering it to the speaker and reassembling everything.

In the end the repaired wire was shorter than the original, but this isn't such a big issue

Universal Temperature Controller (aka the sous-vide-o-tron Mark I)

So I decided to finally jump onto the sous vide bandwagon.  Admittedly, I'm a bit late, but after seeing various hacks here and there for them, I decided to give it a try and see whats what.  Now... A little background about me and food.  I can't cook.  Well, I can make eggs over easy, sometimes do pasta, and have been known to whip up a random veggie or meat dish out of sheer desperation, but on a whole I am not the most useful person to have in the kitchen (other than maybe as chief dish washer...)  I have also failed more dishes than succeeded, and I have set off the fire alarm at least once in every place I've lived which had a kitchen (this is not an exaggeration...)

So why sous vide?  Well, really the only reason is that its a good excuse to do another electronics project and have it actually do something useful.  It might also improve my cooking, or at least allow me to make things that aren't burnt/tough/dry/etc.  So after digging around the net for various plans and ideas, I settled on the simplest (and cheapest) possible setup for my Mark I build.

Parts List:
PID temperature controller (mine was a Sestos D1S from ebay) $40
PT100 temperature probe (also from ebay) $10
Solid state relay (came with the controller)
110v AC outlet and cover (Home Depot) $1
Old SCSI external hard drive case (had it lying around) free?
Misc wires, connectors, heatshrink etc (mainly Harbor Freight) $10

The Build:
I went into this wanting to build a device that wasn't just for sous vide but rather could be used as a general temperature controller.  This meant it had to be a standalone device and have temperature probe input(s) and AC output.  It had to be decently good looking (a rats nest of wires is not very appealing in the kitchen).  My first idea for an enclosure was a simple plastic box, but unfortunately I seemed to lack such a box at that time.  Plan B was to gut an old PC power supply I had lying around and use that as an enclosure, but as I was searching for a suitably old power supply to destroy I found a external SCSI hard drive enclosure I had stashed away.  I've used these in the past for various projects and they're nice because they normally have 12v and 5v power built in as well as many points to screw stuff into.  This case I had stripped bare who knows how long ago but it still had its power switch and power plug, which was all I really needed.  Success!

Assembly after that point was straight forward.  Crimp terminals onto wires, wire according to drawing on temp controller.  The area in the back of the case where the SCSI connectors originally were turned out to be the perfect size for a standard AC outlet, and the panel in the front was also a good fit for the controller (after some convincing with a rotary tool).

I had to cut up some of the drive mounts a bit as I had mounted the controller to one side of the panel and the screw terminals on the back were blocked.

Finally, I decided that instead of having a temperature probe permanently connected, I would rewire it to a phone jack and make that modular as well.  This will be beneficial later if I ever decide to change to a different thermocouple.

The female end of the phone jack is mounted where the fan used to be (its actually glued to a chunk of the front panel I cut off in order to install the controller.  Reuse is AWESOME.)

The finished product:

Testing:
I still lack a proper sous vide vessel.  That being said, a crockpot is decent (and cheap) substitute assuming you pay attention to some details.  First, a crockpot was not meant for quick heating or cooling.  This means that in order to not wait hours for your water to heat up you should probably boil some on the stove and add it to the pot, then mix in some cold water to arrive at a temp close to what you need to cook at.

Another issue is that the default PID values probably will not work very well for such a slow heating/cooling vessel.  My first temperature test the water was consistently 4C over and could not figure out why.  Then I realized it had an autoadjustment routine so I poured in some more water and let that run overnight.  After that it has been +/-0.5C.

Cooking:
First cooking subject was an egg at 63c for an hour.  The results were quite surprising.  The yolk had a consistency of custard while the whites were still pretty runny.  This was mainly due to me accidentally cracking the egg when I dropped it into the pot, but nonetheless the product tasted good.

Second cooking subject was chicken at 61c for two hours.  This was the real test.  I purposely made the chicken as simple as possible with just some salt and pepper rub before sticking into the zip-loc bag and vacuum sealing it (zip-loc vacuum seals are a cheap and effective alternative to a full blown vacuum sealer).  Once they cooked for a couple hours I gave them a sear in some olive oil and they were ready to serve.  The results were very successful, to say the least.  The chicken was moist all the way through and tasted like, well, like perfectly cooked chicken.  Nothing fancy, just chicken done right.

Next Steps:
The project is currently in a working state, but I have many improvements I would like to make to it.  The first thing would be a proper heating vessel.  I'm debating between going either with a coffee urn or a cooler and some immersion heaters.  Cost wise the cooler would be slightly more expensive, but it would also be easier to clean and maintain, as well as having a much larger volume in which to cook in.  On the other hand a coffee urn would blend in to a normal kitchen very well and at the end of the day you still have a working water boiler for coffee or tea.
Being that this controller is pretty universal I'm already looking into building a smoker out of a weber I have out back and a hot plate.  I do have an extra k type thermocouple which came with the controller and that would work just fine as the temp probe in a smoker.

I'll keep this blog updated with further cooking results and other random hacks I do.