Glacial Communications

Not a lot of progress on the Synth-DIY front, but there was a little motion.

Went to Electronoize Playshop on Saturday, where we breadboarded Smokey/Little Gem style amplifiers.

On Sunday, I picked up some more cigar boxes from the cigar store ($1 each – bargain!), and mounted my amp in one:

So I at least got something sorta synth related done… If nothing else, it’s good to have another battery powered amp around. The battery compartment on my Marshall is strangely loose now, and I have to shim the battery in with cardboard.

First hour was kind of unstructured. Noisy stuff, a little Belgian New Beat action, the usual. Second hour used this raw recording by shortwavemusic, as well as some numbers stations and atmospheric phenomena. Perhaps a blueprint for something else I'm working on? Time will tell. Perhaps both of these were loosely based on my DJ sets at Scorched Nuts last weekend?

As I’ve mentioned, this was kind of another busy week, as I ran off to Scorched Nuts, so no news on the synthesizer front. Things are somewhat less hectic now (no long journeys in the near future unless you count the primer in mid-July), so I can hopefully get things back on track now.

Unless of course, I start building tons of radio gear for September, because I think I want to do a radio-centric theme camp at Recycled Rainbow proper. But I’m all about sampling shortwave and atmospheric noises, so that’s almost like building synthesizers, right?

Press The Button Podcast for June 18, 2008. Show notes are available at http://www.glacialcommunications.com/news

As I predicted last week, I don’t have much progress to report this week – we spent approximately 30 hours in the land of the Bacon Maple Doughnut for the destination wedding of some friends – we would have stayed longer, but my wife had to be back at work today. FWIW, I did see some of these wondrous doughnuts, but couldn’t quite go for the instant heart attack of the Bacon Maple. The peanut butter and Oreo was quite good, though.

I did get a number of interesting ideas from the electro-music forums, though.

Because I like open-source tools, I thought I’d give gEDA a shot. I installed it (but see below), and attempted to do a schematic for the “Big Baby 8″ sequencer I hope to build sometime this summer.

Good things:

• I like the features available for the price
• I REALLY like the keyboard controls. They were pretty intuitive and convenient.

Bad things:

• I never actually was able to get the whole suite completely installed on my Mac. I kept running into some kind of Fink Ghostscript dependency loop that prevented something from getting installed. At some point I decided it was “installed enough” – gschem was installed anyway (which was all I really needed), so I gave up on whatever was missing. I did manage to get the whole suite installed on a SPARC Ubuntu box, and once I get my Ubuntu Studio box configured, up,  and running at home , I will try again on that. I’m sure that will go ok.
• For some reason, I couldn’t get the information box that appears on a new schematic to  delete. I did this easily on the SPARC box. It may just be a question of selecting everything else, moving it aside, and then lasso-ing and deleting the box, but with my schematic splayed all over it, doing so would probably nuke whatever’s there.
• Connecting nets to components seemed tricky at best. In order to tell if a connection had been made, I usually ended up selecting a component and moving it around to see if the net moved with it.
• I eventually ended up with a connection I COULD NOT connect a net to, no matter how hard I tried. That’s kind of no good.
• At some point (when I was attempting to correct my not-quite-connected nets), it started getting really crashy. After two such crashes I lost my patience and decided to re-do the whole thing in EAGLE.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It definitely seems like a nice set of tools. I’m still kind of a newb at EDA tools in general, so I may not be the best test case. I will probably try again (but on Linux, rather than OS X)

First half-hour or so was a recording of The Black Fives playing live at a Recycled Rainbow (#9, IIRC) - I was busy doing some tech work (re-routing power to a rarely used preamp and compressor to help with heat issues we're having). The rest is kind of a blur ;-)

I didn’t get any actual construction work done, due to being out of town (this may become a bit repetitious for the rest of the month, since I’ve got stuff going on nearly every weekend…). I tried not to let this slow me down.

Sound Lab:

• Got my 33k resistor and some nicer trimpots

Arduino Seq V2:

• Played with the schematic some more (will post soon)
• Started working on code
• received RBBB Arduino kits (so yeah, I now have something like 8 Arduino (or compatible) boards…)

Big Baby 8:

• Re-did the schematic in EAGLE.
• received my 4017, so prototyping can maybe begin soon

SN-Voice:

• Received first batch of parts (almost all resistors except the tempco and some caps)

Cigarbox modular:

• Found some 1″ L-brackets (or as they call them, “corner braces”). I’d prefer smaller, but at this point I’m happy to have found anything. Many thanks to my dad, who helped me find them.

Experiments in feedback, in part influenced by Tony Void's recent work.

Less progress than I would have hoped. Unfortunately work was rather busy this week (and weekend!)

What’s been done in the last week:

Sound Lab

• Cut Acrylic front panel
• sort out exactly what I need to finish (a 33k resistor, better trimmers, power supply stuff)

Arduino Sequencer V2:

• Design Schematic
• Desoldered VCC/GND connections from pots

“Big Baby 8″ (My version of the Baby 10 sequencer):

• More-or less sorted out how to do it
• Developed a schematic (but I’ll post about that process later. Long story short: gschem on OS X==not fun)

SN-Voice:

• Figured out the difference between parts it needs, and parts on hand
• Started putting together BOM of what I need.
• I should really order the PCB.

Mankato Filter (Since the SN-Voice doesn’t have a VCF, I’ll probably build one of these to go with it, unless anyone’s got a better idea for a VCF…):

• Created a Mouser BOM, but it turns out those aren’t exportable and I’m probably not getting everything there anyway…which makes me wonder why I went through the whole process. I dunno. It was a learning experience, and the project manager is about the closest they come to a wishlist, I guess.

Cigar Box Modular:

• Not much – anyone know where I can find some tiny L-brackets for mounting the PCBs into the box? All my online searching has stymied me.

In related news to all this – If you’re a Clevelander and interested in Synth-DIY-ish things, check out this ExBe post, and contact bbob if you wanna join up. I intend to.