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Published on Leave a comment on Louisville Soundbuilders Meeting

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

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Published on 1 Comment on Finishing the custom front panel Klee

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

So we left off with a PCB ready to go. I used my trusty tin snips to cleanly cut off the excess board. It's a tight fit underneath the panel.
Trimmed panel

...continue reading "Finishing the custom front panel Klee"

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Published on 1 Comment on Using Inkscape for front panel layouts and PCBs

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.