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.
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.
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.
I had some success today with breadboarding a DTMF based 16 channel audio sequencer. Thanks to John Schuch for the original idea and for drawing up the schematic. The basic idea is to be able to route an audio signal to any 1 of 16 speakers. You control it by feeding it stereo audio - in the left channel, you have the DTMF tone corresponding with the number of the speaker you want the sound to come out of, and in the right channel, you simply have the sound itself.
At this stage, I am using 8 LEDs, instead of 16 relays, LEDs because the relays I have don't line up nicely with the breadboard, and only 8 because I am lazy. You can see them blinking away in an entirely unexciting fashion in the video below. While not being very exciting, those LEDs lighting up certainly gave me a sense of accomplishment.
