Jameco Electronic has these amplifier kits one of which should work
fine for our purposes. All you need be able to do is solder a printed
circuit board. My guess is the last one down would work the best.

http://www.jameco.com


Paul Lamar

Paul the price looks nice. Panel mount would be smart. Volume and on/off
switch makes things tiny. But perhaps I have been over here to long. I
should be asking how BIG it should be:)

Anyone can solder this up easily.  Would the output be soldered to the
headphone  jack.  Or would it be better to have a combination male/female
adapter that would plug into the audio input and the headphone line would
then plug into the female backside of the adapter.

The panel could contain a LED with a "ON" status only but could blink if the
output signal reached a certain threshold. Your thoughts.

Doug in Japan

All you really need on the front panel is a mini jack for the ear phones, perhaps
a red power LED and an on and off switch. A lot of guys have panel space
limitations. I think any kind of visual indication of knock is not going
to work well. It may not attract your attention in time to back off.
Second; it is real hard to program a signal processor to tell the
difference between normal engine noises and knock IMHO. Your brain does a good
job of that just from the sound. MSD did both but it took a much larger
and more expensive printed circuit board and case. Here are a few shots
of the inside of the MSD unit. On the other hand backing off could be 
done automatically with a signal processor. That in and of itself
is somewhat controversial as in; do you want the engine to back off when you
are heading for the trees? Something like that happened to an Airbus at
least one time. Perhaps a quick throw of the on and off switch would
prevent that.


Paul Lamar
 
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