Finished building it - the wiring in back is a rat's nest... that's what I get for not heeding Fonik's advice to use a 1U 19" panel.
Loads of fun! Module details here. Picture doesn't show it well, but I used 2.5 mm red-green LEDs to show available pattern steps and the active step.
Yeah... these have little-to-nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that this photo combines two of the best things in the world, minifigs and mini-synths. We went to toys-R-us and felt-up every blind-bag they had to make a complete set this afternoon... embarrassingly lame, given that I'm not an obsessive collector. But I had to get these three...
My appendage is shown in the background.
The Korg monotron is really really tiny, even in relation to some of the other small synths I own. My wonderful wife brought mine back from her business-trip to Tokyo - a shop called Miki Gakki. Best thing about the shop? The Engrish slogan on the bag - "SUPER SENSIBILITY FOR SOUND. WE ARE SOUND RIDERS. REALLY?!"
Put a Blacet SUPER VCA 2930 together last weekend, but haven't had a chance to test it out yet. Lovely stuff - have a look at all of the boards (half-stuffed) that make up this incredibly dense, powerful VCA/panner.
Blacet design has shown signs of evolving... keeping up with the times. No flying-wire spaghetti on the back of this one. Those annoying flying wires are replaced with long 1/10" pin headers, and ribbon cable. Even all of the jacks are all board-mount, including a tiny board for CVC. Beautiful stuff. Here's a side-view of the completed module.
And the obligatory finished product photo:
Love the new mini-knobs - not just aesthetically pleasing, but probably required due to how close they are to the Mix knobs. As always, I am astounded by the quality of these kits - nobody does DIY better than John.
I've talked about doing this forever, so I am happy to finally be able to introduce my 95% complete, voltage controlled DOD Grunge FX-69! Frac-rack modular synths have been in my opinion missing a voltage controlled distortion module, with wave-folders being about as close as I could find. I had a torqued FX69 sitting around, and figured it would sound wonderfullyterrible in my synth setup. I'll spare you the history on all of the approaches I thought about taking to add voltage control to an old pedal, and just say that the Arduino Duemilanove along with an analog devices AD5204 I2C controlled digital pot is perfect for this. You end up with a fantastic, easy to program microcontroller with 4 analog inputs that control four 100 kohm potentiometers, and even have PWM outputs you can use for indicator LED's. This design could work for anyguitar pedal. And the how-to on the Arduino site did all of the heavy lifting for me!
To make it really functional, I used a two input version of the unipolar voltage summer from Ken Stone's CGS33 matrix mixer. I wired it to give a fixed offset voltage from one pot, and zero to unity gain on the other. I chose resistor values to divide the expected 0-10V control voltage in half (the Arduino AtoD want's 0-5V). Also added some diodes to prevent the Arduino from ever seeing negative or >5 volts. To bring input levels down, and output levels up to modular levels, I used a CGS 60 stompbox adapter circuit.
Last, I wired the stomp-pedal switch to the front panel. I'll add gate control to this someday, when I figure out what I really want from it (I left an input on the front panel called "on"). I run the Arduino off of a 10V voltage regulator (you can run it off of the USB power, or an external supply while setting it up initially). Stuffing all of the boards (including the green DOD board at the bottom) behind a 2U Frac panel took a little doing, and it isn't "finished" looking, but damn, this thing snarls! You can use the loudness input as a flavored VCA (kind of like Buchla LPG's), and coupled with a Blacet envelope follower (Input Processor IO2225), you can do things to a guitar others can only dream of! And the whole thing (less the pedal) cost substantially less than $100!
Hopefully I'll find the time to do a YouTube video soon, after my forthcoming SMS Audio Appendage video.
Next on my Arduino agenda, I want to make another sorely missing module, a midi-tempo synched LFO. Shouldn't be hard with the MIDIVOX I just picked up from the Maker's Shed.
A Smith-Corona-Four from 1928 that I picked up for $10 this morning. Love the Dupont-Duco maroon paint with (formerly) gold accents which have turned into crazed, leathery looking swatches- gives it a lovely Steam-punk look.
Since I was ordering random parts from Futurlec, I ordered a couple of hard to find 4-contact, 3.5 mm audio-plugs and some cheap-ass electret microphone elements. Using these, I put one of these things together: (yeah - it's ugly... I'm not quite finished with it yet)
Sometimes I ramble on about my modular synth hobby to a colleague of mine that is quite an accomplished pianist. He is quite kind to tolerate my ramblings. He found this little gem squirrled away at home, and gave it to me!
Finally finished up four "Buchla" Resonant Lopass Gate boards I sat on for a while from Thomas White. Stuffing two of these into a 2U Frac module is a little tight - Here is a Front Panel Express file of the layout I used. I went very spartan on the labels... ran out of O's in my dry-transfer set DAMNIT! The labels make sense to me, so whatever...
I am a huge scavenger... spend a good amount of every weekend thrifting, garage saling, and wandering the local swapmeet that I fondly refer to as "the mercado". Last weekend, a little green and white rubbery thing at the back of a stall caught my eye. The vendor couldn't figure out how to open it (it took me a minute myself, I'm ashamed to say), and didn't know what the heck it was. I had read about MIT Media Labs One Laptop Per Child project, and thought that this weird little locked up thing might be one, but the bugger didn't have any markings that indicated what it was on the outside. Once I got it open, I was pretty sure it was an OLPC. It booted up off of its battery, so I offered to take it off of the vendor's hands. He happily took $30.
