This Monday Sept 20th we’re starting a Louisville Soundbuilder’s group that will be meeting every other Monday. We meet to talk shop about analog and digital synthesizers, circuit-bending, electronic noisemakers, computer music, etc. You are encouraged to bring equipment and show off some sounds. The focus is DIY and is a great resource for people that want to learn how to get started.

This first meeting will feature demonstrations from Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo, Elephant 6, et al. He will be demonstrating his Teletron, a hacked Mindflex device for completely mind controlled synthesis experimentation. Some video here:

I will be demonstrating my homebuilt analog synthesizers, including exotic interfaces like the Klee sequencer (a bit shifted analog sequencer) and some experimentations in isomorphic keyboard design.

The meeting is at 8pm sharp, free to anyone who wants to attend, learn and contribute.
Help out by promoting the facebook event page:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=127615557287197&ref=ts

I just finished building the “Brown Sound In A Box 2″ distortion pedal. I’m not a professional by any means but it was a fun project.

TOP

GUTS

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leIS6up0dtQ

[Les Paul Studio / Marshall 2x12 Combo amp]

This past weekend I experimented with dyeing some etched PCBs. I used Rit dye easily found in grocery stores. It was quick and dirty. I just boiled some water, mixed in a heavy concentration of black dye and let it sit for a couple of hours.



The dye worked well enough. Rather than just soaking in a cooling dye, I should have been applying a constant heat and agitating the solution in order to get a darker saturation. And when removing flux after soldering the board, dye came off as well. But in general this is a promising way to make nicer looking DIY PCB boards in the future.

I have put the materials on line for the Freeduino Spring Training class if you want to take a look. In these lessons you will find sample circuits for most of the things you might want to do with your Freeduino/Arduino. All of the code examples work and are debugged. Enjoy!

http://wiki.lvl1.org/Freediuino_Spring_Training

Brian

LVL1 is proud to announce it’s latest class- the Freeduino Spring Training Workshop. Time and place is May 18, 2010 from 7-10 pm at the U of L Speed School Room 210. This workshop will help you learn the skills to be able to play with that shiny Arduino or Freeduino that you have been dying to figure out! Our coaches will step you through building several fun circuits that demonstrate how to interface your Arduino with LED’s, LCD’s, switches, sensors, potentiometers, motors and sound. After taking this class, you should be able to breadboard a circuit and then program your Arduino. We know this class will be a GRAND SLAM!

The cost of the workshop is $50 ($80 if you need a Freeduino). Besides the world class instruction, you will get your very own breadboard, several LED’s (even a tri-colored one), a cool blue LCD display, a temperature sensor, a photo sensor, several switches, many resistors (with brightly colored bands!), a few potentiometers, a motor and a speaker… everything you need to batter up!

OK, enough with the cheezy baseball references. This highly requested workshop will be just what you need to get started learning electronics, bit-banging, embedded computer interfacing and programming. It is sure to be a h.. good time.

Sign up is easy. GO HERE!

Here is a copy of the flyer if you would like to read it, or post it somewhere. Hope to see you there!

Here’s some video of the Klee sequencer in action. Along with details on finishing up from previous posts. Continued from

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These are for my Boy Scout troop. They are being made on my homemade CNC machine. The plans for the CNC I used are here. There are newer plans now – these will be the next machine I build. This is where I got my electronics.

Click through the pictures, and I will tell the story.

For those of you who do not know… and Elmo is a document camera. Basically what I did here is I took an old security camera (from a dome) that was abandoned and re purposed it with some pvc pipe and wood, etc.

I had to rewire the camera to a 12v wall wart plug and also change the composite video out to an RCA jack. I mounted the camera on the end of a piece of PVC pipe attached to some scrap wood. The pink thing on the top of the Elmo is a plastic gum container that is holding a circuit board that is needed for the camera. It is there for protection and is screwed to the pvc pipe. Not pretty, but functional.

The whole thing does work and produces a nice clean video signal that I can output to a projector. I hope to be able to use it for LVL1′s Freeduino soldering classes. The only problem with it is that it shows skin tones and tans as a green color. I think this has to do with the white balance or something.

This is continued from my previous post about using Inkscape to draw pcb and front panel designs. When I last left you, I had created a multi-layered inkscape drawing that had front and back designs for the PCB along with a drill pattern for the panel.

First I’m going to get out my Toner Transfer paper. This is thick stock paper with a water soluble coating. It allows you to fuse a printed image to a surface and then remove the paper when submerged in water. The stuff is a little pricey at about $1 a page, but it’s well worth it for making good clean transfers.

I’m using my home laser printer to make the PCB transfer. Ink from a laser printer is fused to the paper when heat and pressure is applied. Note that an inkjet printer uses a different method not suitable for the process I’m describing here. LASER PRINTERS ONLY. I keep a spare laser printer cartridge that I use solely for making PCBs. It’s best to have a dark layer of ink. Regular printing jobs will run down the cartridge and I do this often enough that it makes sense to have a separate cartidge.

I start the print job and manually feed the Toner Transfer paper. Make sure you’re printing on the shiny reflective side!

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I’m working on a new synthesizer module for my rig called a ‘Klee’ sequencer. I’ll detail more throughout the build process, but I want to share my experience using Inkscape to design a front panel.

Inkscape is great! It’s an open source, cross platform vector graphics program with many uses. I started playing around with it a couple of years ago to create show fliers. I’m by no means proficient, but I know how to get around.

Back to the panel… I’m trying to cram lots of potentiometers, jacks and LEDs into a smaller panel in order to save space. I found some Alpha clear-shaft potentiometers that you can position a 3mm LED underneath. Very cool, although I have yet to find clear acrylic knobs to match.. In addition, I want to layout the sequencer lights in an oval pattern. Normally I’d use gEDA’s pcb program to do a circuit design. But my components are very uniform and the layout is straightforward so I’ll draw it up in… inkscape!

First I can use the datasheets for my components to get precise dimensions. Inkscape allows you to create shapes with precise units in px, mm, inches, etc. I make the footprints for each component and they look like this.

The blue circles are guides for drilling holes in the panels. The red shapes show how large the components are. The black circles are via pads for a solder mask. I copy, move, rotate all of these elements to fit everything into my panel layout. Then I draw traces between these pads for the PCB layout. I can also label them so I remember what’s what. I’ll come back to this with a more detailed process at some point, but here’s the final drawing after all of that.

Click on the image for the full size awesomeness. Next I can separate all the colors into different layers with Inkscape’s XML editor. Here’s what I’ll use to etch the PCB bottom layer.

There’s also a top layer, but we can skip that. Here’s the drill layer template I’ll use to drill out all the panel holes.

That’s all for now. Next in this series, I’ll show you how I prepare and etch the PCB. Inkscape rules, it’s good for lots of things beyond making web graphics.