Hello! I’m Noah Vawter! Welcome to building the One-Bit Groovebox, a.k.a. Bit Box.

Starring Mariletta!

First, make sure you have a comfy, roomy place to work. Like most directions, you should read through all of these once before you start.

Gather all of your parts.

This is the motherboard, or main PCB. Yours will be pre-cut in two halves for you.

The first step is to solder in the 40-pin socket.

If you've never soldered before, don't fret. Just hold the soldering iron to both the oval-shaped pad, and the pin at the same time. Heat the up by holding the iron there for a slow count of 5.

Then, apply some solder to the place where the tip of the iron, the pin and the pad all meet. It should be warm there now, and the solder will melt. Keep applying solder until you have a pretty pyramid, and *the pad is completely covered*.

You may find it helpful to rest the board on the handles of tools like this.

Next, gather the two 12 pF capacitors and the 16 MHz crystal.

gather, gather. :)

In this picture, you can see where the components go (the bottom left corner).

And here's what they look like poking through.

...

Solder them in place.

Then trim the excess leads.

Next install the resistors for the tri-color LED. Pay attention to the colors. Two of them are red, black, green, black, red (105 Ohm). One of them is red, black, yellow, blue, red (154 Ohm).

To make them fit, bend the leads like this.

Then trim the excess leads.

Here is their placement: the two 105 Ohm resistors go together. Solder them into place and cut their excess leads.

Next, add the firmware button and the firmware port. You can use these to modify the Bit Box's software later on if you like! You attach a USB serial port to the 5-pin interface and turn the box on while holding down the white button to upload a new program.

When it's soldered in place, it should stick off the board like this.

And the white button should face outside like this.

Now, switch to the other half of the PCB. First solder on the 7805 voltage regulator. You'll find that since its leads are thicker, it takes longer to heat them up before you can apply the solder.

Then, get the FET amplifier ready. It looks like this.

Bend the middle pin forward just a little bit.

Then, place it on the board. Notice the shape is a half-moon. You must get the orientation right.

Now, solder on the 47 uF capacitor. You must pay attention to its orientation. Notice how one side of it has minus signs.

And there is a plus sign (+) on the board. Put minus to minus and plus to plus. Then, solder and trim excess leads.

Now, you'll install the headers for the lineout and speaker wires.

Next the power/volume knob.

Then the control knob.

Then, the 9V battery holder.

This is what it should look like. Make sure you put in that screw and nut! If you don't, the battery holder will flap around and eventually pull of off the board :(

And the tri-color LED. Make sure its orientation matches this picture. The longest lead goes to the third hole. Also: don't push it through all the way. You want about 1/2" of leads so you can flex the LED later.

This is how the LED should look.

Next, we'll start working on the case!

Place the buttons template on the top of the case.

And with a permanent marker, trace the holes.

Then, drill them out with a _______ inch drill bit. Make sure you're wearing safety glasses.

If you have plastic crusties, you can neaten up the holes with a utility knife.

Now, you'll need some space for the left circuit board, so trim the VHS cassette spindle holders. Usually, you only have to do one side.

Leaving it relatively flat.

Then, place the completed left circuit board into the VHS cassette box and mark where the knob shafts are going to poke through.

mark, mark.

Then, drill through those marks with ______ inch drill bit. (safety glasses and tie your dreadlocks back).

Now, prepare the board interconnect cable. This is the four-conductor, multi-colored ribbon cable.

First, fray it into four wires.

Then, strip each one.

And "tin" each one. You tin wires like this:

Dabble some excess solder onto the tip of the soldering iron, then slather the tip of the iron over the wires. This makes the wires shinier, easier to work with and less frayed. Do it on both ends of the interconnect cable.

See those four wires next to the word "STOP"? That's where you connect them. The order doesn't matter, but it must match the other side.

As you can see, the interconnect cable goes straight across.

Notice how yellow is on the bottom and purple is on the top on both boards

Now, get the speaker!

And solder on one of the headers. The polarity doesn't matter!

Now, place your pre-programmed Atmega32 microcontroller chip into the socket. Notice the LED orientation, btw. It's poking out quite a bit. That's how it's supposed to be.

Remove all of the nuts and washers from the pushbuttons. Note: the instrument uses 4 red buttons and 6 black ones, but I send you 5 and 7 because every now and then I get a flakey switch. So you have an extra.

Now push them through the holes and lightly tighten the nuts. We'll tighten them all the way later.

This is way you didn't tighten them all the way yet! You should twist the buttons in their positions until the all line up like this.

This is the proper layout. The red ones on the outside.

...So that you can push them through the circuit board like this! This step is a little bit tricky. It may take you some time, so have patience.

Once the board is on there, go ahead and solder this puppies in place. Again, their terminals are pretty thick, so soldering will be a bit slower than other components.

Wow! We're getting pretty far!

Next, place the speaker inside the box and trace where the holes will go.

Make sure when you do this that the metal of the speaker's frame does NOT touch the pins of the microcontroller, or anything else on the PCBs!

And drill those holes out with a _____ " drill bit.

Oh, and make sure you're wearing your safety glasses when you do this, right Mariletta!

Then, drill holes for the sound to come out. Try to think of a cool pattern. In my experience, between 15 and 25 holes makes it sound the best. If you have too few holes, it sounds quiet and muffled. If you have too many, it starts to get too trebley. Try for 20 holes.

Use the four pairs of small screws and nuts to hold the speaker in place.

You'll notice the speaker is a little too big to actually close the box. This is because I found the biggest speaker I could.

No problem. Just trace where it touches the bottom of the box and cut a hole for the speaker.

You can start the hole with a drill.

\Then finish with a utility knife.

Ta-da! Later, you can spin the box around on a table using the speaker! Makes cool sound and light!

Now, grab the output Jack.

And attach the other header to it.

Drill a hole on the spine of the case with a _____ " drill bit.

And tighten the but to hold the output jack in place. You can connect the speaker and output jacks to the board now.

Note: the labels on the circuit boards get covered up by the headers (ooops), so refer to these instructions to know which ones goes where.

If you have a stick of glue from a glue gun, I recommend using it as a diffuser for the LED.

At this point, you should put in a battery and test the thing out to make sure it works!

If it does, then congrats! Go ahead and fasten the control and power/volume knobs on.

And tighten the knobs on, too.