Thanks to the data sheet and ehobbycorner, I now have a nice little breadboard with two leds that flash based on the trigger coming out of my sequencer.

Now I just need to see how this can be transferred across and applied to the omnichord switches I need to fire.

I’m thinking I’ll take common ground from the jacks to the speaker ground, then basically do hot in and individual grounds out, I’m not convinced that will work, but I have a bread board I know works, so it’s just a matter of trying and seeing.

It seemed like a prime candidate, all of the “play surfaces” are basically push buttons, so all I’d need to do is wire up some simple transistor/optocoupler CV controlled switches that on trigger short out the button pads.

Since there are 3 rows of 9 buttons for the chord selector I thought I’d first look at the strum panel. I wasn’t entirely sure how it operated, the top surface looks like a simple physical short between multiple tightly spaced exposed pads.

After cracking the case open I discovered it was nice and simple. There strum panel connects to a 16 pin header area. 14 of those pins are the notes in the “strum”. 1 pin is the common ground. 1 pin is the kill switch pad.

So all that was needed was to wire 14 jacks up to transistors in such a way that when a trigger CV is applied to it, it shorts 1 pin with the common ground.

I was able to achieve this with a single note, but when I wired up the second jack, I found that I was now getting 2 notes for a trigger at either jack, not 1 note from each.

Something is wrong with my assumptions or my transistor wiring. So I’ve reached out to the good folks at Muffwigglers and Electro-music forums to see what they think.

This is a VERY quick and dirty safari extension, all it does is include a single CSS file in your pages that contains 1 CSS definition that will hide any content that has the classname “waveform”. This rule will only occur if you are on a site that starts with the url http://soundcloud.com

Everything else is left as it was before, the progress bar, the loading bar, the comments, it’s just the waveform that gets hidden.

That’s all it does, but maybe it will make your life easier if you visit soundcloud a lot and you don’t like seeing the waveforms.

This is huge if you happen to have 1 or 2 like I do. I have the 1 that I stripped all the loop stuff out of, and I’m rehousing as an effects box almost.

But I still have one that is boxed and has been patiently waiting for me to be able to load my own custom 5 second long samples onto.

Marbs now has U-load for loading the samples onto the ucreate and LopGenerator for creating the specific 5 second long samples.

Uload is currently only windows and linux (I’m trying to find out if I can help with the Osx compiler. LopGenerator is available in all 3 flavors. They’re all up on Gitorious under GNU license.

Huge thank you from me to Marbs for spending the time to do this. I really look forward to seeing what comes of this first step.

Just saw an awesome link on the main uCreate blog post I made a year or so ago. The ucreate by mattel has such huge potential for such a cheap toy, but due to it’s locked down system that potential hasn’t been exploited to it’s fullest.

Someone at mattel really needs to understand that these could become the next speak and spell for circuit benders and diy music nerds and they’d shift tens of thousands of units, if they’d just leak or open up the communication protocols for “hackers” to create new interfaces, load their own samples and create their own audio filters.

Well until Mattel gets with the program we have a new hope, and that’s Marbs, go check out his site, bookmark it and follow along as he works out how to unlock the full potential of these awesome little toys.

http://marbs-online.blogspot.com/2011/02/ucreate-proof-of-concept.html

Marbs has been getting some help from Scragz http://scragz.com/ who was able to provide him some of the files before his uCreate arrived after being shipped half way round the world.

Wishing them both good luck with their endeavors.

…more details to come.

(check the comments, I’m posting updates down there)

Touch Arc is a Monome Arc emulator for development purposes. It is very much not intended to be “nice” to use or a competitor to the hardware, so please don’t complain about that aspect (if you want a useable and ergonomic interface that’s a joy to use, buy an Arc).

Touch Arc comprises two parts, a TouchOSC template and a Max patch that works as the middle ware and converts the Arc OSC your app is transmitting into a format the touchosc template can interpret, and vica versa it takes the touchosc template interface input and converts it into fake Arc OSC format that your app can handle.

This way developers can work on proof of concept, sound in the knowledge that once the arc hardware is released their applications will function.

The touchOSC template initially replicates all the in and out points of the Arc 2 (I’ll do an Arc 4 one later if there is a demand).

This means there are two duplicated UI’s for each encoder, these are made up of:

- 64 slider ui elements, which can handle values of 0 – 15 (these are the LED’s)
- 4 momentary buttons, that output every 100ms either -2, -1, +1, +2 (these are the encoder turns).
- 1 momentary button that registers as an encoder press event.

For the LED side of things, due to the limitations in the TouchOSC interface, the LED UI is made up of 4 multisliders each made up of 16 subsliders. We could have used 64 single sliders, but they can’t go narrow enough to get 64 of them in a row, even in landscape mode, this means the LED handling middleware needs to do a fair amount of math converting 0-64 into 0-3 + 0-15 coordinates. For this reason (and mainly due to hitting a brick wall with the range wrapping round at 64, I used Javascript as the main math function handling.

The interaction conversion side of things is a much easier straight translation, so I handled that with just Max. The encoder rotation interface is faked by firing a value every 100ms for as long as one of the valued buttons is pressed in the UI. I could replace these with a slider the more you slide it from the center the faster it fires the +1 or -1 values, but i figured for ease and simplicity this approach worked.

Source code is available on google projects, so you can download it and try it out http://code.google.com/p/touch-arc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk. If you can find bugs or better ways of approaching the problem, I’m very happy to update the code, or please feel free to use SVN and update the code or post other examples directly to the project.

I have spoken to Brian at Monome and he’s very happy for me to make this available, if it makes developers lives a little easier pre launch, hopefully that will be of benefit to everyone.

Update:

I’m working on a native Max UI, to see if that renders better without so many hicups. It could also be used in app patches where you’d like an onscreen representation of the Arc UI. Should be ready for testing very soon.

There are a ton of uses I can see in having easy access to the radio waves: random noise, strange sounds, fuzz and white noise.

But being able to control the tuning with CV so I can jump around the dial, or slew my way from one spot to another I think would be really awesome.  If for no other reason than I like the idea of programming up a sequence and then every time it runs it will be different since the sound source is constantly evolving and changing.

So research began by looking at how radios work, and things didn’t look good to start off.  It seems that radio tuning is all about capacitance, not voltage.

The simplest tuner consists of an inductor and capacitor connected in parallel. The capacitor is usually made to be variable (although the inductor can made variable it requires a more complex mechanism and is rarely used). This creates a resonant circuit which responds to an alternating current of one frequency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuner_(radio)

This means “most” of the time the tuning pot is not a pot but a variable capacitor type thing, which means you can’t just swap out the pot with a CV source (which was my initial hope, ignorance is bliss).

All seemed at a lose until I found out that some radios use what is called “varactor diode tuning” this is a diode that in essence replaces the capacitor bit, but the neat bit about the diode is that it’s voltage controlled.  This means that the tuning pot will be handling voltage and suddenly we have somewhere we can bolt our CV into.

The next snippet of info, was that Ramsey (the makers of great electronics DIY kits) make a series of kits that all use Varactor Diode Tuning, include a $40 FM receiver kit.

So later part of 2010 I ordered one up, and it sat on a shelf for a few months whilst I tried to finish off other “higher priority” projects.

Then NAMM 2011 came around, and I was intrigued to see that Buchla, the makers of VERY high end modular synths was showcasing a new module the 272e which had 4 FM receivers that could all be referenced via CV.  Now their concept is very different to mine, they have digital tuners that you tune and they then allow you to control the outage from each using complex envelopes, there is no CV control of the tuning – that said they do look really very nice indeed.

Buchla patch Model 272e through the 296e Spectral Processor. from Richard Devine on Vimeo.

But if nothing else it spurred me back into life.  So earlier this week I soldered up the Ramsey kit.

With some awesome help over on the muffwiggler forums (MANY THANKS DAVERJ!)

I tapped into a couple of places on the PCB and hooked it up to a very low frequency Oscillator I had running a sine wave, and low and behold I had CV controlled tuning.

Now the tricky bit.  I doesn’t work great. It doesn’t work with CV only with the Oscillator, so it needs a stack load more tweaking and testing.  But my hope is in the next week to get it hooked up to Silent Way and have a fulling CV tunable radio incorporated into my modular synth.

I picked up a $10 blue toy megaphone/voice changer. It comes with 5 switches down the site to choose different voice changin effects.

After removing the PCB from the plastic case, replacing the microphone with a 1/4″ in, and the speaker with a 1/4″ out. Removing all the plastic switches, drilling out the holes, replacing with metal toggle switches. Finding a way to rewire the LED’s that show the audion level. Finding a way to supress the op/amp chip with a giant resistor so it doesn’t increase the volume 10 times. All I needed to do was stick it in a temp hardboard panel and mount it in my eurorack.

I rather like the effects, they really are very nasty.

It would be great if the intensity of each effect was controllable with a knob, but I tried and nothing seemed to work.

It would be great if the toggles could also be fired with CV triggers, but I have no idea where to start.

So for now, this is it.

I’ll find a link to the actual megaphone and will post here soon.

edit:

There’s a picture on the right of what I started with, it’s not my picture, just one I found on flickr that was the same.

Initial Inspiration came from Casper Electronics

http://casperelectronics.com/​finished-pieces/​megaphone/​cm2/​

Here we go…

http://cgi.ebay.com/​Multi-Voice-Changer-10-VOICE-EFFECTS-NEW-Megaphone_W0QQitemZ220694348490QQcategoryZ106259QQcmdZViewItem