I 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.
I 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_.
I’ve been thinking of putting one together recently. I have a Makerbot I can use 
I found