My most recent dilemma in home automation was how to stream our record player to our wireless radios. It is located in a different room than our receiver, which is located in a different room than our main speaker. Funny enough our main speaker is an old turntable system from the 60’s that we thought looked cool. I had dreams of refurbishing it so that the turntable inside of it worked but that project is way down the priority list.
After some research I found a high quality wireless transmitter that would skip our receiver altogether and go straight to our turntable speaker. Easy enough. Now for the tricksy part. How to control the volume of the record player?
For that I went to down to the local electronics dealer (whose name rhymes with Smadio Smack) and bought my pieces. I spent the next 2 hours sorting out the wiring and this is where the title of this post comes in. It took me WAY too long to sort out the wiring of this volume knob. This was because I just looked up what others had done, and not bothered to read what they were wiring it for in the first place.
And now for the point of this long winded story…
Anytime a project gets me frustrated or takes me longer than it should it’s because I just follow along with the group instead of figuring out what I actually want to do with it. And while more often than not it is frustrating and time consuming I actually think that I learn more by doing it this way. I also come up with more ideas, which is the whole point of all of this. And so far I’ve managed too…
-Fry two different iPhone headphone jacks
-Explode an iPhone battery
-Fry two different (cheap, thank god) audio amps
-And shock myself over and over again
I’m going to continue doing things my way while also taking the things that I’ve learned to make it all go smoother, cooler, and less shocky. Fortunately I have yet to make the same mistake twice.