Welcome to our first Patron's Only Build Video! Thanks to all of your for making TekThing possible. We get a steady trickle of Raspberry Pi questions, so we thought that might be a fun place to start. We walk you through the setup, explain why the Pi might cost you a bit more than you expected to make it useful, some of our favorite projects and distros, and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7mj1z0Mnbg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFpx0hpyFOw

A Haako soldering station, Arduino programming, servos, photo resistors, skulls... and the biggest glue gun you've ever seen all come together for a spooky Patreon Only Build from TekThing. Thanks for your support!

Want to learn how to solder? Follow along with Shannon as she builds (and gets the code installed for) a SnowPi! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DHOc5MXcd0

I've always wanted a pair o' full on audiophile grade Class A Monoblock amps... but who's got thousands of dollars to drop on an amp? Turns out Nelson Pass (legendary amp designer) loves DIY, and put together an easy to build amp for first timers. Called the Amp Camp Amp, we build it from a DIYaudio kit the video! We also talk amp types... Class A, B, A/B, and D. Now I'm torn between enjoying this one, and building something even more powerful... you need sensitive speakers to get these 8W amps rocking. Hope you enjoy the build, and thank you for making TekThing possible! Patrick

March Build Video: Can Patrick actually avoid spaghetti cables? Cable management... it's hard to tell which one of us is worse at it. We both tend to Connect All The Things, install the OS, and start using the PC. Today, though, we're actually going to try to make it look nice inside a case, and get our Cable Management on!

How much PC can you get for $500? What parts would we buy? What would we upgrade first? All that in more in this month's Patron Only build!

MAME Build!!! You can spend thousands on a pre-built arcade cabinet to play games... or just to the Internet Arcade and play 'em in your browser, but we're going DIY on this one, building our own cabinet. In this episode (it's gonna take more than one), we walk you through where to get the Mulitple Arcade Machine Emulator, what it does, whether we should put it in a stand up cabinet or a cocktail table. We walk through the MAME set up on a Windows PC, then put the EmuLoader frontend n it to make it easier to use, and why we'll be using something like Ultimac's I-PAC (instead of a straight keyboard encoder) so we can use buttons, joysticks, trackballs instead of the keyboard to play the games! And, of course, we talk ROMS, the actual bits of code that contain the games, whether they're legal, where you can get 'em, and how to load 'em into MAME... and the big pile of 'em up on Archive.org.

Our MAME cabinet build got sidetracked (Patrick had to take a step back and reboot the project 'cause table saw fail) so for July, we brought in Robert Heron to talk about making your HD or UHD TV look right... yup, we're going deep on Calibration. Ever wonder about brightness, white balance, or why most TVs don't look right out of the box? Maybe if you need to spend money on hardware, or if calibration disks are enough? Does HDR make calibration harder? Maybe a one minute mini calibration? Should you calibrate your desktop monitor and what are the best tools for it?

We build out, liquid cool, benchmark, and beat on one of AMD's new Ryzen 7 1800X CPUs just for you, patrons.

Summer storms, rolling blackouts, keeping Patrick's laptop charged while he's working in the Airstream... let's talk about building a battery box up, complete with 12V outlets, USB power, and an inverter. We re-purposed an old car battery, but we talk about better battery options if you're building from the ground up! (And not scrounging the garage like Patrick did.)

I needed a benchtop power supply, I had a couple PC power supply units that weren't being used. It turns out you can make that's pretty slick benchtop power supply out of an old PSU!