[Dragonfly DIY] eBay clock kit

I bought this clock kit to see if it would make a good soldering class demo kit. It's ridiculously cheap at $3.50 or something like that, shipped. I put it together last night, and the answer is, no, not really.

I'm posting here since it's being sold a lot on eBay so maybe someone can see this before buying.



It's pretty crappy. I mean, it's alright but:

* Requires 5V supply, no regulation.
* No battery backup. Some kits for not much more money have battery
* Beeper is frighteningly loud with no volume control
* 24 hour mode only, as far as I can tell.
* It has alarms but it's unclear exactly how they work, set mode just lets you set registers A through I, A is hours, B is minutes, some of them are "on" or "off, some others are hours and minutes of which surely some are the alarm (or alarms), but there's no instructions.
* There's no way to mute the alarm as far as I can tell. It screams bloody murder for 10 seconds or so then stops.

So yeah, I'm going to keep looking. I like clocks and may use this for something but I think it would be more fun to design my own.

Buying a new audio recorder

Well, I went ahead and ordered a new audio recorder, a Zoom H6. It's kind of a big investment for an audio recorder ($399) but I eventually figured hey, I use my current audio recorder more than I use my SLR, and even $399 is far less than I paid for my SLR.

I'm probably going to pick up a couple of extra microphones to go into it as well. And I'll probably start using this at church since I can record both board and ambient tracks simultaneously.

The one thing I need that I probably don't have time to get is the in-depth knowledge that it would take to really make the most of this thing. I guess I'll just do the best I can. I wonder if there's a "live event recording for dummies" book or site out there.