Author Archives: superfro - Page 4

The (re)Birth of a synth!

Posted by on April 4, 2013 4 comments

2013-04-04 02.22.25I decided to dust off a project that I’ve been working on-and-off for over a year now.  Just to introduce it really fast…  I’m taking a vintage sound generation chip, the YM2149F or AY-3-8910 and giving it a modern upgrade.  First thing I did was see how hard it would be to add a MIDI interface to it.  I was able to create a USB MIDI stack, and map notes of the chip to MIDI notes, then I thought it would be cool to add hardware MIDI as well.  I’ve created most of the things in the MIDI world to equivalents on the chip.  Most of the noise generation and ADSR envelope filters are implemented as CC commands.  Pitch-bend works, velocity is toggleable via DIP switch (and just really does a volume, I personally don’t like velocity implemented this way).  And volume works.  I’ve been able to use fruity loops to create some cool retro sounding music.  Then it dawned on me that I didn’t even implement the most obvious feature!  Streaming old chiptunes!  With the help of The Leonard Homepage I used his open source emulation app to hack into my device and just stream the registers to the chip, producing really awesome music!

I’m looking to make this a kit for other people to experience, so I was going over the assembly instructions last night.  I need to work on documentation, some code fixes, and to order a buncha parts first so its not quite ready but… soon enough. I’ll see if I can throw a video up soon.

Cross platforming with MinGW/GCC

Posted by on March 26, 2013 No comments

I’ve been working on this project that needs data streamed to the serial port, and I’m working on making it cross platform.  That’s at Windows/Linux … I’m sure if I get Linux working an OSX port would be easier.  I have to say MinGW is an great environment.  Teamed up with Eclipse, (other than my normal gripes with Eclipse) I’m pretty satisfied I must say.  I’m able to take my project over to Linux and compile just the same.

Now dealing with serial ports in Windows/Linux still needs some abstraction, I thought the MinGW lib’s would actually help more on this, but they seem to work fine for Linux but the process is slightly different in Windows, thus I still had to make wrapper functions for open/close/write/read and a few #if directives.  Not too bad, I just thought this is something simple enough that would have been built in already.  Oh also had to macro define sleep for a delay.  I should try to figure out how to compile for both environments with 1 compiler, maybe use crosstool.  For now I’m ok just having the same code and building on both environments.

The ord bot build has begun!

Posted by on March 21, 2013 No comments

2013-03-21 03.10.17I was greeted with a package today containing some of the parts for my 3d printer (ord boy hadron).  So late last night I spent about 6 hours putting the frame together.  I can’t say the assembly documentation was well spelled out, it was just barely enough to get it done.  And even then I know I put some parts on wrong.  I’m not worried about it though I just wanted to roughly put it together, as I have no electronics other than steppers at the moment.  So I’m still waiting on the extruder, heat bed, controller.  I didn’t bother running wires or aligning the rails.  It moves pretty good but I need to take the gantry off and flip the mounting bracket for the extruder, also some how I have the stepper on the wrong side for the y axis even though it shouldn’t matter.  I feel good about it, there were some annoying things like the front foot didn’t mount well. The holes in the aluminum weren’t tapped and the only tap I had was a cheap chinese one that didn’t work _at all_.

More 3D Printer parts ordered

Posted by on March 19, 2013 No comments

I ordered a bunch of stuff from Panucatt Devices, namely the Azteeg X3 controller, Helios 200 Heat bed, and a viki lcd just for fun.  I also went with the dual extruders from QU-BD, despite what I’ve read on the internet.  There are a lot of unhappy people with this extruder, i’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work out i’ll pick up something else.  I still need a power supply, I’m not sure why people are moving away from using ATX power supplies, maybe for size?

Building a 3D Printer

Posted by on March 18, 2013 2 comments

ord_bot_2-1-300x248I’ve been thinking of putting one together recently.  I have a Makerbot I can use at my hackerspace. But I’d like to have one at the house.  So shopping around I decided to go with the Ord Bot platform, Automation Technologies sells a good kit for the base platform but it’s missing some things like the extruder/electronics/bed.  I ordered that.  Just got my shipping notice.

 

 

Using VirtualBox without the GUI

Posted by on March 18, 2013 No comments

Very frequently I have the need to use a Windows XP machine remotely, this virtual machine is set up on my local server so I don’t really run a GUI all the time on it.  So what I’ve done is (using the GUI) set up VirtualBox, installed / configured it then shut it down.  To bring the machine I made a quick bash script:

#!/bin/sh
VBoxHeadless -s "Windows XP VM"

And run it from within screen (to keep the process alive after disconnect).  After that I just RDP into the box and use it like a home away from home.  Pretty handy, especially if you had a multitude of machines you wanted to bring up and use then shut down without having to first vnc/remote into another gui, then start the virtualbox gui, and use the gui from a gui gui gu gui… gui.

Hexy’s power woes revisited

Posted by on March 15, 2013 No comments

I found this great article (where I shamelessly stole the image to the left from) it has a lot of stress testing on different alkalines and they threw in some rechargables.  You can clearly see by the graph that most alkalines are going to buckle real fast when you try to draw 2 amps from them.  This makes sense because when I was using the alkalines the result was much worse than the bench power supply (which current limits shortly after 3A).  If you look further down he does this test on some NIMH cells and he was able to get 5A out of it without too much voltage drop.  This is clearly the explanation why the alkalines were so horrible.  So I got a few different power options coming.   I got some cheap buck regulators from fleabay and some cells coming.  Hopefully it’s sufficient to at least run through the demo software properly!