Evil Paul's blog

There it is, my DIY Arduinome 10h in all it's $2 off-brand tupperware glory!
I have some nice bits of jarrah to make a decent enclosure later.
I gave it a test run with the Amen breakbeat - it's a law, or an old town charter, or something.

Close-up of the DIY resistor network I constructed using a piece of stripboard.

All components added, ready for wiring.

Note the change of number - I accidentally erased the original number when cleaning off flux residue with isopropyl alcohol. When I flashed the FTDI serial number I set it to a40h-666 >:-}

While it was in this state I hooked it up to monomebase and confirmed how the connections line up with a piece of breadboard jumper wire and an LED. It's easy to lose track, so I drew up a little matrix and the connectors on a notepad to make sure I knew for sure what went were.

If you click through to Flickr you can read the annotations for the IN and OUT connectors.

Wired up ...
The rainbow wire wasn't strictly necessary, but it does help you keep track of what wire goes were.
I just left the unused wires floating around in case I want to use them later.

I thought about extending the 10h to a 'virtual 40h' by adding an accelerometer and tapping the appropriate side to get it to slide to the next quadrant - à la Smacbook. I don't want the hassle of tapping the 3.3v from the FTDI chip of my NG edition Arduino, so it will have to wait until I get a current generation Arduino/Freeduino board.

I think the basic idea has got legs though and people could use it to turn a 64 into a virtual 128 or 256 as well.

I popped a CD on top to give an idea of scale. The buttons are quite nice and seem to be able to take a pounding.
The LEDs aren't terribly bright, I was probably a bit conservative when I picked the current limiting resistor. You can also pop the tops off and remove the white semi-opaque diffusion 'buttons' for extra brightness. You could also print symbols or legends on a transpant sheet and insert them between the diffusion layer and the red cap to add labels, which is nice. I haven't tried it, but it should work pretty well.

Praise "Bob"!

My nicest looking project to date, a true bypass looper pedal with switchable feedback knob, sexxy purple swirl paintjob and slow colour-change LED

I'm driving the LED with 2xAAA batteries, so it should take AGES to go flat - I did a test run for 24 hours and they still had heaps of juice left.

Thanks to Dragonfly for the swirl tutorial and to Dano for the circuit layout.

Update 08 Mar 09: Have posted about the completed 10h here.

Long time, no blag!

Time to do some catch-up posts, but first, my latest project, which is always cooler and more interesting than whatever I did beforehand (to me anyway).

I've been planning on a DIY Monome for a while, since I found some nice panel-mount pushbuttons with separately controlled LED at Jaycar. Jaycar charge a bit of a premium though, so I suggest you shop around.

First up, I drilled 16 holes (16mm) in a piece of scrap metal I grabbed from a neighbours dumpster across the street who where moving out. I got most of the way with a stepped unibit, but I don't have one that goes up to 16mm, so I had to take it the rest of the way with a hand reamer. If I decide to build a 8x8, I'll definitely get a bigger unibit. I thought about getting a a faceplate done up by Machinecollective but since I'm using these great switches that are designed to be easily mounted, I figure I should just stick with the DIY ethic for this one.

While playing around with a cardboard faceplate, I realised that if I rotated all the switches 45 degrees it would be a lot easier to connect all the buses together.

The anti-ghosting/masking diodes have just enough lead length to run together nicely.

I'm no Peter Vogel, but I do like the aesthetic produced by the bus wiring. I used plan old solid core Cat5 for the wire - cheap and easily obtained.


When I was finally finished I hooked up the switches to a battery pack that I hot-glued a couple of LEDs to (I was playing with these) via a breadboard. I discovered that the buttons are nice and sensitive - the LED would light up when the button was only depressed about 1/4 to 1/3 of it's full travel - it makes for a good tactile experience, even suspended precariously in the PCB holder.

One of the reasons I went with a 4x4 to start with was that I wasn't sure about how good the buttons would be to use. Having a cute little 4x4 to indulge in MPC beat-making shenanigans is pretty good too.

I'm planning to use an iDuino for the controller, since it's small, cheap and has FT232RL based USB, so it can be flashed with the Arduinome naming protocol (a40h-xxx).

For now, it's breadboard time, since my order of the chips required (MAX7219, 74HC165, 74HC164) has arrived but I haven't bought or built an Arduinome Shield yet.

When it's finished, I'd like to set it up as an art installation and invite other artists to compose their own works for it, since people could easily participate by burning an audio CD. There is also the potential for interactive control using Max/MSP or other audio apps. I'm sure you could work out a way to get an Arduino involved too ;-).

I uploaded some .wav files too, but I have to wait for them to make it through the moderation queue before I can link to them.
UPDATE: I finally remembered to post the link to the WAV files.
Circuit Bending Challenge Sample Pack @ The Freesound Project

I'm going to participate in the Circuit Bending Challenge tomorrow, so I hit the Op-Shops in preparation. The nice charitable Christian types that run them don't seem to like opening their stores on a Sunday for some reason.

I boxed these up pretty much straight after Electrofringe finished up, but I haven't had a chance to take any photos until today. I think they turned out very well and they feel quite good in your hands when your playing with them.

Sweet! They've scored a bunch of MacBooks to use for the Process Space. They have these funky transparent shells with a big colour printout inside, telling us that the laptops are sponsored by www.mac1.com.au .