Woop Woop Woop!

Check out my new music at BENTLOVE.COM! Download the MP3s from there!

Built this over lunch one day.  It’s not finished or perfect, be sure to load the youtube players before touching the crossfadar, and none of the official music vids will play because the money grubbers disabled video embedding.  But when you find copies of the track and it works its sorta fun.  Oh, and seems to leak memory.  But I think other than that, it’s perfect ;D

check it!

Ever find that you’ve been doing something wrong for a really long time?

I found that out today when I borrowed a coworker’s “solder sucker”. This thing rocks!

This is my x0xb0x I built over the last few months:

A number of pictures are on my flickr:

And now, Audio examples too!
Demo 1
Demo 2
Squarewave Demo

I wanted to make something inventive for my girlfriend for christmas and came up with this little guy:

what is he? A stream of consciousness generator.  Basically he creates (terrible) recipes mad-lib, recites wikipedia articles and one-liner jokes, starwars facts, and spam email quotes.

He’s also a summary of a lot of tech I enjoy working with: AVR atmega32 processor multiplexing LEDs inside an spraypainted altoids tin :D.

(hi Desi <3 )

Ottawa axes arts travel program

Originally that was this post in entirety but then I read some blog comments and now I’m REALLY sad.

“Not really. MY government is simply saying that MY taxes won’t go to pay for these folks to travel out of country to “spread the word” of whatever their version of Canada is. They could be called Sweet Friends of Jesus for all I care. MY concern is why any artist is given access to MY tax dollars to support themselves. I don’t see this as being censorship at all. I’m sure “Holy Fuck” has a huge following and that people in foreign countries are just falling over themselves wanting to be entertained by these wonderful folks. And I’m equally sure that those legions of foreign fans would have no problem footing the bill for these artists to travel to them. MY government understands this. Apparently Warren the government that YOU want to see in power would see things differently.” here

—

“Holy **** Warren, just where in the charter of rights does it state that “the Arts” have a right to tax payers dollars?

Go peddle your arts, sink or swim…just stop taking money out of my pocket so you can say you support the Arts…Go buy a ticket, send a donation…Find a corporate sponsor. I’ll do the same for what my family decides it considers art.

How embarrassingly reaching is it to see the pulling of my hard earned Tax money from Arts as a form of censorship!”
here.

thats not my canada

spent a bit of time last night working on the x0xb0x.

Built the PS without hassle - turns out the alesis micron’s power supply both fits and supplies the right 9vAC so I can use that until I get a dedicated one for the x0x. Didn’t bother testing every stage, I knew what I was doing so I built the whole thing and tested the result and it was perfect. Went on to do half the VCO.

Appears that I didn’t get LED standoffs in my order time to order them now I guess!

Spent a bit of lunch time googling cold solder joints.. While my soldering has improved tremendously in the last year I still have a bit of work with reproducing exact results.. I like it when the solder gets sucked to the top side of the board, and am worried that when it doesn’t it’s a cold joint. I’ve noticed a couple things:

best method - apply heat, count to 3 or 4, apply solder directly to pad/component intersection.

a shortcut I take that is BAD is often I apply solder to “iron/pad” or “iron/component” at which point it’s really the iron that melts the solder, not the component, and then I don’t get a nice joint.

another indicator of a good joint is when applying heat from the solder and counting, if there is a slight blob of solder on the iron it will often flow to the components when they are hot enough.. not good enough for a joint but its useful to see to know that at that point the components are ready.

I wonder if the whole “use a heat sink to save your components” - anyone actually do that? I see it in books but never in reality…

I picked up my mouser order with 95% of the parts after work.  I already have the digikey and ladyada orders so that’s just about everything (except standoffs but I can get those after I start making some noise).  My plan for building are:

- resistors are sorted in order of ohmage

- capacitors sorted in order of capaticance.

- everything else sorted by “build phase”: power supply, vco, vcf, env, io, etc.

As I start each phase my plan is to sort out the resistors and caps I need, build and test that phase, and then reorder the remaining parts.  So far I have the PS components separated and the resistors and capacitors sorted.

WoopWoopWoop TB-1: dual atari punk console - clicky for audio sample, and a youtube demo before it’s sold.

Here are some first MP3’s from my first DIY synth. It’s written in C.. right now it just runs on a PC but it’s portable and will be running eventually on an AVR atmega32 or 16 if I can swing it.

Demo 1 (saw wave mixed with noise wave)
Demo 2 (amplitude test, 0%->100%, sawtooth with -1oct sine)
Demo 3 (amplitude test, 100%->0%, squarewave)