Pants off to the 303- x0xb0x

Today I finally finished the x0xb0x #1. It has been over a year since I finished the build but for some reason I just did not order a case. Well finally the x0xb0x adorns its pactec PT-10 case and it looks beautiful. Aside from missing two knobs, I just could not find the right ones.

Synth32 - Update

As some may know the initial Synth32 boards arrived a few weeks ago, and I have been populating the boards. In the fashion of a true prototype there are some errors which the version 2 board will not have, additionally there are some things I deliberately omitted which will be included such as a 5th order low-pass filter, and on board power supply which includes +5, +3.3, and -5 volts for better amplification.



The revision 2 board is in every respect better than the first. A great number of ideas have been explored and the board is much tighter with a better layout, and access to every pin will now be a reality with very large pads. I think everyone will be pleased.

The second order of proto-boards will happen in the next few weeks after routing of the new board is completed. Please be patient as I want to eliminate all bugs before I do a larger order for these boards.

Loose Ends - Bench Top Powersupply from an ATX computer power supply.

Today I decided to finish a project which has been sitting in a bin for about 6 months.

The project was found here at Incructables.com

It is a fantastic project, and with the supply used I now have +5v, -5v, +3.3v, +12v and -12v. The total price to finish this modification was around $30 CAD. Most of the cost was for the banana plugs.

The project is really easy and requires only a 10 ohm 10watt resistor, 2 220 ohm resistors, two LED's, and banana plugs. I am looking forward to not having to make a breadboard power supply for each project.

An additional link: Here

Easy LCD screen interface on Atmega32 using Peter Fleury's LCD Driver

How easy is it to connect an LCD screen to an Atmega32? Well very easy.

Peter Fleury's HD44780 compatible LCD library works quite well with only one modification to the code; you must edit the clock frequency in the test_lcd.c file to your desired target, mine was 16000000 for 16mHz.

Talk about easy!!!

In this example I use PORT A which is commonly used as an 10-bit analog to digital converter. Seeing as I have no use for A-to-D on this project PORT A seems like the logical choice. In this project the port is running as standard digital I/O for screen display using 4-bits. PORTA,0-4 are the 4-bit data lines and PORTA,5-7 are the Reg. Select, Read/Write, and Enable pins. The test_lcd.c file requires no editing and the lcd.h file only requires the change of


"#define XTAL 4000000"

to

"#define XTAL 16000000"

to the desired clock speed of the target MCU. The size of the test_lcd.hex file loaded to the atmega32 was 3kb, which is quite small and leaves 29kb of free Flash space for your program code. If one so desired much of the driver is written in C which could be optimized in assembler to decrease the size of the code base. I however am willing to let 3kb go.

Compilation of the test_lcd.c was done with AVR-GCC 4.4.2 on Mac OS 10.6, then loaded with AVR Studio 4.18 on Windows XP using an AVR ISP MkII.

Power Supply board 9v, 5v, 3v

This board has been in my library for a while just waiting for the right time to make an appearance. It works although the version 1 looked like New York City. I needed to fix some serious errors. All is good now and I am ready to get this one going. You will notice the FTC "resistor fuse" this is optional as it will limit the amperage.

Pickit 2 3.3v Voltage converter

I found a schematic online for a 3.3v logic converter for the Pickit 2, and decided to make a board for it. The key was making it very small. I wanted something I could just fit in my pocket with thePickit 2 programmer. The design has to be tested but the schematic looked sound. If you want a copy of the board in PDF to make your own just send me a message, its going to take me a little while to put the files on the server.


update: Jan 10, 2010

Aduino

So I made an arduino board! Well not quite, its a little different more like the barebones arduino idea with surface mount parts. I wanted something small with a tiny power regulator for 5v logic only, which suited my needs better than some of the other boards available. Regardless the files are available if you want them.

update Jan 10, 2010

Bonome

So I was going through some old posts and decided to see what Julien Bayle of Julienbayle.net is doing and was looking at the monome clone called the Bonome. This project really excited me it was a meeting of the minds with so many different people, hardware, software, firmware, and of course we can not forget the creators the original monome team.

Now with my new project I have decided to switch to PIC32. Why because I want to learn another platform and there are a few other reasons such as the support for DSP with there new library. Less coding means more fun for me.



This board is something new a PIC32 development system designed for audio. I have some interesting needs for art installation ideas however, the realization of the works have been halted due in part to the extreme cost of audio synthesizers. Of course there is a large amount of intellectual property under the hood of a synth, but developing your own can be rewarding, and teaches you much about synthesis techniques. There is a forum post started here on Electro-Music. Inventor has designed a system called eChuck based on the Chuck programming language; essentially it is an audio programming language. The eChuck concept will allow people to port that idea onto hardware.

I expect to be in prototype soon, I just need to hear back from a board house on the cost of manufacture of a few prototypes. In the mean time a programming application framework is being developed to meat my needs, and additionally board for tactile input and visual output are in the works. Which brings me back the the bonome, I have designed the unit with a header to connect to the 8x8 keypad / led matrix. If I can port the code over I will but it is more likely that I will write the interface to suit my own uses internally for sequencing. But its a way to reuse some older equipment if you have it.

Stay tuned for additional info on the project either here or on the Electro-music forum.

Snow Leopard Update

So as many of you know I have been suffering through Apple's Snow Leopard so many of you do not have to. The latest find to correct some of the problems I have been experinceing is this: booting into safe mode. I am attempting it right now, as my Disk Utility would not allow for complete repair to the Preferences. If the article is correct this should correct the issue if not there is a second option which requires you to turn off File Sharing and then turn it back on, log out and presto, working SL, OS.

[10 min later]

And it works. I am able to create encripted disk images for storing personal information, saving works resonably well. However, the next week will be the real test.

Online Drawing

A quick search online today revealed some interesting programs for drawing and painting online. As if there were not enough distractions at work already.

If you have any experience with those tools post a comment on which ones you find best for your workflow, or explain how you find these tools enhance your workflow or creativity.

Snow Leopard

Well after some growing pains installing Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, everything is running as normal. I encountered an issue with my HP LaserJet 1020 not working, as a result of the update. This has been a consistent problem when using an HP printer with my Mac's. The solution was quite simple if you know where to look, OpenPrinting for OSX - HP using Foomatic. One of the main selling points of the OS update was improved printer support, but this one area seems to be problematic, I realize that apple uses the GNU Cups development initiative for its printing however, for some the PDD (postscript printer description) files are just as equally important. However they are not integrated into the OS or at times difficult to find. Regardless the issue is now resolved and the solutions are now posted.

I also find it interesting how much of your computer system you can setup from just within your web browser now. For instance CUPS printing can be setup using http://localhost:631/, which is just one example. Firefox has about:config although it attempts to scare you into not using it. A better description of about:config hacks can be found here Eriwen.com.


My Apple Support Forums Post - dioioib with the solution to HP LaserJet 1020 printing issues in Snow Leopard.

Max/MSP synth building

It has been quite some time since I have posted anything related to Max/MSP, Puredata or PWGL. In many respects for synthesis building I find PWGL much easier to work with, this might be a result of errors I encountered in some of the tutorials for Max/MSP. Some of the tutorials[1] for Max/MSP have errors partly due to the version they were developed for. The main issue I was experiencing surrounds the use of the umenu with the filtergraph~ and biquad~ objects. The problem with the tutorial example is the point at which the umenu item is connected to the filtergraph~ element. This connection should not happen at the right most outlet but rather should connect to the center outlet. This outlet is labeled as "Menu Item Text Evaluated as a Message" which should be connected to the leftmost inlet "a0 coefficient."





This organization of objects changes the filtergraph~ objects filter curve depending on the option selected in the umenu object. Perhaps due to changes and additions in Max/MSP there are a few missing filter types in the example on the Cycling '74 site. However, here is a complete list of filters: display, lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop, peaknotch, lowshelf, highshelf, resonant, allpass. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain what each one of these filter types do. If you are interested in learning more about these filters I would recommend the book "The Computer Music Tutorial." The new filter types include resonant which is similar to bandpass but to use a definition from physics, "resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at larger amplitude at some frequencies than at others." And although not technically a filter allpass, functions as a bypass for the filter.


[1] Max/MSP Synth Building with Max/MSP #3