I haven't had much time to work on my projects this past week and probably won't for at least another 4 days. However, I did end up ordering a reasonably priced Arbitrary Waveform Generator for about $90 that seems to get good reviews on the internet, but it will take up to a month to arrive. So I may still try and build one with locally sourced parts that's reasonably priced.

I ordered and received an Arduino Due because I wanted to play around with the DACs on it. I bought a genuine one and it actually jumped up in price by about $10 just after I bought it. I ordered and received a 12-bit DAC off of Amazon for about $6 to play around with as well. I put together a simple circuit and uploaded a Function Generator Sketch that I found online, but it uses a table of values that are pre-calculated and the resolution is kind of poor. So it doesn't actually use a "function" to "generate" the signal. I'm rewriting the sketch so that it is calculated out. This is more of a proof-of-concept project than anything else and maybe I can produce a real function generator that people can use.

The existing sketch has one potentiometer to adjust the frequency and buttons to select between 4 different waves. Since mine will actually be generated, I'm adding an amplitude potentiometer as well. I ordered some breadboard mounting ones that should arrive in a couple of days along with some more breadboard. Most of my breadboard is old stuff from Radio Shack that has single bus lines along the top and bottom. Price has come way down too, so I got 3 long ones for about $10. I'll probably continue toying around with this small project for the next few days, but I don't expect to be able to do much else.

I also looked into the Dremel project and it definitely looks possible. I found a model on thingiverse to print off a battery casing along with instructions on how to properly trick the Dremel into working with an AC adapter with a resistor, so I have a couple options to try out.