Robot Dialogs

When I bought the AS3310 chips from Electric Druid for the polyphonic envelope I also bought a few other chips to experiment with. One that I expected to be a pretty straight forward project to set up for a module was the Noise2 .   The chip is just an 8 pin PIC preprogrammed to output white and pink noise. There's a thorough writeup on the development of the firmware here . Only 4 pins on the Noise2 are used and it's all 0 to 5V so interfacing is pretty easy. I wanted both filtered and unfiltered white noise and a pink noise output all buffered to prevent undo current draw on the Noise2 chip and amplified to 0 to 10V in my setup which required 3 op-amps. That left one op-amp available so I also have an inverted filtered white noise. With 4 outputs the jacks on the module could be on top and bottom and support the PCB properly. The filter in this case is a simple RC low pass filter straight off the data sheet. I went about simulating the circuit and then breadboarding it to co...

 A quick update now that I've received version 2 of the Level PCB. ( For more info see v1 details here. ) The PCB with LEDs is virtually identical to the v1 version. The only real difference was that I panelized the design to get more of them for v2.    On the PCB that handles signals and power, a lot of changes were made. Used different footprint for resistors. Used wider footprints for caps I have that are 5mm pitch. Avoided collisions between the arduino header footprint and other components. Moved the 20pin header to allow for less depth overall. Used more consistent trace sizes. Added a path between the two potential inputs that can be jumpered so that the two inputs are multipled together. In using the module I find two inputs unhelpful typically. When the jumper is bridged, R20, R21, R22 and C2 aren't required. Removed a log of capacitors. Removed the 5V regulator, and rely on the arduino pro mini's regulator. Removed power LED. Removed mounting holes. All of that ...

This post is about a DIY design of a polyphonic envelope eurorack module. The idea for this module started after I bought a second hand Roland System-8 and started to understand the polyphonic features better. I had already built several oscilators from a few DIY kit providers and was running into the issue of not having enough envelopes for them all. So decided to try and build a polyphonic envelope. I jumped right into this design with a chip selection, I went over to Electric Druid and grabbed a few AS3310 ADSR chips to experiment with. I didn't have any modules that used this chip but while breadboarding a design I came across a useful reference on Eddy Bergman's site . Ultimately my goals of a polyphonic version complicated the design a bit. One thing to note on the AS3310 is that is has some odd control voltages, particularly the Attack, Decay and Release CVs are 0 to -5V instead of 0 to +5V like the Sustain CV. I wanted 0 to 10V tolerant CV inputs and potentiometers too...

This build was inspired by this post from ElectroDruid , at least in part. I have been getting into sound synthesis over the past year and needed simple module on my Eurorack setup that I can plug anything into and see if it's working (or peaking). There are a few modules out there like what I've made here but I'm doing most of my synth as DIY kits or pure DIY of my own design. The idea started on the breadboard, and because I had an Arduino Pro Mini in my box of spares that's what I used.  Here all 16 outer pins of the Pro Mini and two of the inner analog pins are connected to the row of LEDs each of which has a series resistor. for a total of 18 LEDs, which was later reduced to 16.  There were still two analog pins available (the green and yellow wires) which were used as audio inputs. The other two analog inputs were later used for some timing/debugging. The audio and control signals on Eurorack can swing ±10V which would damage the Arduino if used directly. To solve...

<update> Tonight 9/21 I'll have the Typo...matic online searching for tweets with the following #tags: #ccckc #linux #arduino #selectric #typomatic There will also be a google hangout where you can watch it type away live! </update> I spent the evening at CCCKC tinkering with TTYtter and some bash scripting and coreutils that were new to me... The result is the world's worst implementation of a polling Twitter search that can feed new tweets to any other bash command. I'll be hooking this up to the Typo...matic at the next public event I lug it out to... I have a chunk of c code that talks to the Typo...matic's Arduino and it takes as arguments the serial port and a file of text to print. So the end result of the script below is a text file of recent tweets matching the #ccckc hash tag. Feel free to gank this script and do dumb things with it. I'm not proud of it from a technical standpoint but for a hack it'll do.

A few months before Maker Faire KC a friend started working on a Mini Sumo Bot and in passing I said I could probably get a bot ready for that...well those months slipped away and two weeks prior to the faire I had no bot (and had been constantly hounded by said friend). So I did a grand total of 30 minutes of research on the internets and ordered some parts (not recommended). I ordered everything from Canada (Fingertech and Solarbotics) so I had to wait almost another week to get started. Here's the parts list I ended up with: Chassis/Motors/Tires/Line Sensors: FingerTech "Cobra" Mini-Sumo Robot 4WD Kit Motor Controller: 2x Sparkfun's Motor Driver 1A Dual TB6612FNG Micro-controller: Arduino Pro Mini 328 - 5V Proximity Sensors: BittyBot 3-Way Object Sensor Battery: Venom 10C 2S 1250mAh 7.4V LiPO Line Sensors (Included w/ chassis kit): Phototransistor - QRD1114 More Stats below...  The first thing I did was construct the BittyBoty 3-Way Object Se...