Farnsworth Discussion

How is everyone mounting their faceplates into their farnworths? With all the buttons and dials attached I would imagine the faceplate would just sit in the fly box. Is this the case? Or is it necessary to mount the faceplate so it won't fall out of the box?
 
Also, how is the electronic module used to blink the red light? I see how it turns the sound on and off.

The LED on the sound module that I have flashes when the sound is playing only. When programming in the sounds via USB one can set the flash rate for the LED for each of the four sounds. 3Hz seems to look good.

I have removed the switches from the module and wired the switch connections to four of the positions of a 12 position rotary switch then to the pushbutton. This way one of four sounds can be selected and played. This module seems to be the best one I could find that had an LED and could play multiple sounds with decent quality. The number and length of the sounds will limit the quality.

http://www.electronics123.com/s.nl/it.A/id.3041/.f

It can play a total of 300 seconds and you can assign a number of sounds to one button that will play consecutively.


It's a tight fit in there though with 3 AA batteries to power it. I've yet to do the screen image and since there is no longer room to put a small TFT screen in there, I will have to put up with a single image.

How is everyone mounting their faceplates into their farnworths? With all the buttons and dials attached I would imagine the faceplate would just sit in the fly box. Is this the case? Or is it necessary to mount the faceplate so it won't fall out of the box?

The pot and 12 position rotary switch I have used sit flat in the bottom of the box so that limits how far down into the box it can go. At the top I will use a couple of posts glued either to the faceplate or the bottom of the box and small rare earth magnets on the other to hold it in position. These little neodymium magents are incredibly strong.
 
Thanks alot PeterLC.J ust the info I needed.

You don't happen to have a pic of your interior setup/wiring of your farnsworth do you? The LED on the circuit board doesn't look like it would light up the red lens enough. I love the fact that you wired it to the rotary switch but I can't envision how the wire then runs to the push button.
 
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If anyone would like clean audio files of the ringer, pick up and hang up sounds, let me know. I have The same wav files used by the sound effects department of Warehouse 13.
 
It's a bit of a mess as the board and batteries are just sitting the case at the moment so it might be hard to see from a photo.

On the sound board each of the 4 pushbuttons had two wires - one was unique to each switch and the other went to ground. Pushing the button simply connected that unique wire to ground. As ground is a common point effectively, the 4 ground connections can be replaced with a single wire.

Each of the unique wires now goes to one of 4 of the 12 connections on the rotary switch while the common ground connection now goes through the pushbutton on the faceplate to the single centre terminal on the rotary switch.

I replaced the small red LED on the board with a 10mm white LED on wires and it works quite well. I will simply use a couple of drops of glue to hold it
in place inside the red lens.

If it isn't clear I could probably draw a diagram of how it is. I might be able to tidy things up enough to take a photo. I'll have to dig it out as I've not had a chance to do anything to it for a while.

Thanks alot PeterLC.J ust the info I needed.

You don't happen to have a pic of your interior setup/wiring of your farnsworth do you? The LED on the circuit board doesn't look like it would light up the red lens enough. I love the fact that you wired it to the rotary switch but I can't envision how the wire then runs to the push button.
 
Peter, you and I had almost the same exact idea... The difference is that I plan on programming the sound board so each button plays Ringing, Pick-up, Hang-up with consecutive button presses, but each one will have a different amount of dead air prior to the ringing starting, to simulate the delay that the QMx version has.

I guess great minds think alike.

-S

It's a bit of a mess as the board and batteries are just sitting the case at the moment so it might be hard to see from a photo.

On the sound board each of the 4 pushbuttons had two wires - one was unique to each switch and the other went to ground. Pushing the button simply connected that unique wire to ground. As ground is a common point effectively, the 4 ground connections can be replaced with a single wire.

Each of the unique wires now goes to one of 4 of the 12 connections on the rotary switch while the common ground connection now goes through the pushbutton on the faceplate to the single centre terminal on the rotary switch.

I replaced the small red LED on the board with a 10mm white LED on wires and it works quite well. I will simply use a couple of drops of glue to hold it
in place inside the red lens.

If it isn't clear I could probably draw a diagram of how it is. I might be able to tidy things up enough to take a photo. I'll have to dig it out as I've not had a chance to do anything to it for a while.
 
I might well use multiple sound files for a single button/rotary selection but connecting all 4 switch inputs lets me use 4 sets of sounds whether they be single or multiple sounds. It is easy enough to program the board so my final sound selection may well change after completing the Farnworth or even in the future.


Peter, you and I had almost the same exact idea... The difference is that I plan on programming the sound board so each button plays Ringing, Pick-up, Hang-up with consecutive button presses, but each one will have a different amount of dead air prior to the ringing starting, to simulate the delay that the QMx version has.

I guess great minds think alike.

-S
 
Re: Warehouse 13 Prop Research - The Farnsworth

Got my plastic plates today!

316234_10150276935053581_643693580_8003464_7592434_n.jpg


They forgot the center dial post cutout, but that is easy to do. They also could have been another 1/32 of an inch wider, but if I can always redo them after Dragoncon if I decide I'm that picky, and then maybe offer our original ones here for sale at the $9.50 cost.

I'm very pleased with how they came out, considering its the first time I've used illustrator in ages, and I was going by a lot of guess work.
The plastic faceplate looks very nice! What did you paint in the inner dial with?
 
I was very pleased with them. I just used regular walmart water based acrylic metallic brass (or possibly one of the golds) for all the engraved "black" plastic, and also made sure I hit all the edges of th eopenings as well.

I used the same paint types for the weathering as well. Since the inset center dial is kind of darkly weathered anyway, it looked fine.

If I wanted a newer look, I would have just used a spray gold, after masking off the brass plated parts.
 
The only parts I found accurate at all at radio shack was the side jacks.

I think all the other parts except the center right pushbutton arived here within a few days of ordering. (I used the first post and other posts in the thread for sources.)

That damned pushbutton though was a devil to obtain.
 
Yes please!

Okay, I've been sending these out to a person at a time because I've been too lazy to get them uploaded somewhere... which is totally counter-logical. So I stuck them on MediaFire in a zip file. So, here you go!

FarnsworthFX.zip

Enjoy!

Quick FYI: These are the exact files used by the Warehouse 13 Post Production team... but to implement them in my build, I found that I had to edit the ring file a bit to generate some silence at the end in order to get a proper gap between rings during looping.
 
i was wondering if anyone had a uk supplier for the knobs as the companies i have found are going to charge me $50-$60 ndollars shipping for somthing that could be sent easily in a usps small envelope
 
If you are looking for electricial components in the UK then Maplins is normally a good starting place.
 
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