Evil Paul's blog

TGIMBOEJ!

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:39:15 +1000

TGIMBOEJ_Brisvegas_II

Look what arrived in the mail recently.

Yes! it's The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk! Let's peek inside shall we?

TGIMBOEJ_Brisvegas_II_inside

OK, what shall I take? This stuff looks good ...

TGIMBOEJ_taken

Here's the stuff that was left after I took my goodies.

TGIMBOEJ_contents

Here's the stuff I put in to replace what I took and to ah, "pay it forward", as it were. Head on over to this photo on Flickr to see the notes. Having Flickr and Vox tied together is very handy but it could be done a bit better.

TGIMBOEJ_added

I encountered a small PCB that had a weird component on board that I don't recognize, so I took a couple of extra photos.

TGIMBOEJ_WTF_01

TGIMBOEJ_WTF_02

Look, it says DANGER! Must be good. I'm putting it back into TGIMBOEJ hopefully someone else can get some fun out of it.

On Monday I shall take the mighty Brisvegas II shoebox down to the post office and send it on it's way to it's next stop: little-scale in Adelaide.

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Arduinome 10h completed

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:38:32 +1100

Ooooooh, blinky!

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.

arduinome resistor network

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

arduinome shield almost finished

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.

Mmmmmm, blinky

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.

CD for scale

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.

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Arduinome shields

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:40:38 +1100

Yay! My arduinome shield boards arrived today. Thanks unsped!

arduinome shields

Praise "Bob"!

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Feedback Looper

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:23:25 +1000

Feedback Looper

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.

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Arduinome

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:27:41 +1000

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.

Vanity-shot

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.

Matrix-wiring

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

Wiring-closeup

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.

Testing

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.

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DTMF 16 Channel sequencer

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:09:40 +1100

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.

DTMF

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 ;-).

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Circuit Bending Challenge completed! [UPDATED 21Mar08]

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:18:00 +1100

I ended up bending 2 of the things I got yesterday for the Circuit Bending Challenge. The driving toy was very straightforward, it had your standard black blob IC inside. I replaced the volume and pitch resistors with pots and added a switch for the 'indicators' sound, since it makes a decent beat. It doesn't sound as good using the 6.5mm output jack, I might need to do something to emulate the speaker better or try a transformer.

The 'black mystery box' was pretty cool to start off with so it didn't need much to take it to the next level. I gave it an RCA out and a switch that puts it into constant burble mode. There were some good pitch up and pitch down points but without re-casing I couldn't use them unless I went for touch contacts and I didn't have anything handy. They way it goes off at random intervals makes it great for doing some dub style bleeps, as I demonstrate below.

Mystery Box

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

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Circuit Bending Challenge

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 14:35:15 +1000

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.

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Nibblers!

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 12:46:40 +1000

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.

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Electrofringe 2007 Day Two

nobody@vox.com(Evil Paul) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:05:40 +1000

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 .

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