steve cooley presents

Look, if you watch fox news, please for the love of God, watch this. At least half-way through. I know you’re going to want to stop watching it, but man up and power through it. Just watch to half-way. You can do it.

I’m a hobbyist typographer. The first piece of commercial software I bought with my own money was Altsys’ Fontographer. (aside: I just checked, and a new company is selling an updated version, and for quite a bit of money. )

Anyway, as a youngster interested in fonts, I produced a small handful of typefaces that I updated as needed. Many years later I found into what we now call FontForge and managed to produce a typeface or two. While the application itself is the right price (open source and free) and extremely full featured, the unix/X11 interface was new for me, so I had a learning curve to overcome to finish anything. More recently, my interest was raised again by FontStruct. I produced several typefaces, most notably for me was netlabel square ends with 1104 glyphs drawn.

Most recently, the iPad has opened up another opportunity to create typefaces with the reasonably priced iFontMaker. I love this app. It’s awesome. Here’s a demo video they just released:

It’s so easy and fun to use, that I’ve produced these so far.

Download Robot Arms

Download Cooley Chunk

Download Cooley Urban Scrawl

Download Cooley Inverted

Download Cooley Questionable Sans

Download Cooley Draftsmanship

Download Cooley Casual

Download Cooley Cats

Download Cooley Greeting Card Serif

Download Cooley Greeting Card Sans

Download Cooley Inconsistent Double

Download Rawr!

Download Cooley Slowball … or not.

Download Cooley Aloha, although this is a work in progress

Okidoke. It’s taking me a while to get my act together, but I’m getting there. I have three kits available. They are kit serial numbers 1, 2, and 3.

The kit includes:

1. circuit board
2. eight 10k faders
3. two 10k potentiometers
4. thirty two LED Tact buttons (16 red, 16 green)
5. sixty four 100 ohm resistors
6. 9 various values of resistors other than 100 ohms
7. 16 x 2 LCD screen from Modern Device
8. LCD driver board kit (assembly is required) from Modern Device (where you will get the assembly instructions, BTW)

Things *not* included:
* Arduino Mega
* enclosure + hardware

Price is $249 plus shipping, payment via paypal, shipment via USPS if international, UPS if within the USA.

I even made two videos showing how to assemble the kits, so watch these before you do anything else. Make sure these totally makes sense to you, and you have no reservations about your ability to put this kit together. It’s not a particularly hard kit to put together, but there is a lot of repetitive soldering involved, so you’re the right candidate if you’re already comfortable with soldering, and you already have all of the tools you see in the videos. You’re also already familiar with the arduino platform and ALSO completely realize that this kit runs on the ARDUINO MEGA, and NOT any other variant. If you don’t have an ARDUINO MEGA, you NEED to BUY one. I’m using every single pin on the mega. I couldn’t squeeze this much functionality out of a regular arduino… it’s just too awesome for the little guy.

You have to file down the headers because of where I chose to place the arduino mega. This is sort of cumbersome but it’s also how I was able to keep beatseqr from being any larger than it already is. The Roland TR-808 is cool and all, but c’mon already.. that thing is huge. Plus every square inch of circuit board costs big bucks, so squeezing the arduino into a shield configuration works well enough. I’d maybe try another tactic in the future, but this kits works today. I sold Beatseqr serial number 8 based on this kit.

Ok, so: 1. you read all of the above? 2. you saw both videos and aren’t tripping out? 3. you saw that you need an arduino mega? 4. still interested? email me steve at beatseqr dot com.

I am pleased to announce that MIDI sync out is working in Steppa as of version 0.5! Now you can sync your Beatseqr to any MIDI hardware or software that can receive MIDI clock, which opens a whole new world of possibilities. One scenario to imagine is being able to playback melody or bassline patterns that you previously created along side on-the-fly created drum patterns from Beatseqr. This can really be helpful if you use Beatseqr for live performing like we do for Haptic Synapses. We tested MIDI sync with software like Propellerhead Reason and Ableton Live as well as hardware like the Korg ESX-1…fun stuff!

Also added to Steppa 0.5 is the ability to sync to an audio click track. I know the technique sounds very old-school, but it works….well enough for Haptic Synapses and Antacid Crew to use it to sync all kinds of hardware (old and new) at their last jam session together at Mighty in San Francisco. So how do you like them apples?

Keep an eye on http://beatseqr.com for links to the new version and developing info about Steppa.

Almost done! Just need to go buy a couple of knobs. I’m getting a really good feel for what materials work and how to use them. Woohoo!! Also, i did this track with it, using reason:

Serial number 8 final assembly test by stevecooley

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Progress is slow but definitely still happening. Along with determining if silicone buttons are doable, I’ve been working on how I can produce cases at home instead of farming them out, or having to get up to techshop and the serious hassle that is to get time in on the laser. My CNC router has been put to hard labor and here are some of the preliminary results:

here’s an early test. many things wrong.

Here’s the results of about 3 tests later. Much closer. I’ve solved some of the hardest problems, now I just need to get a workflow going and I think I’ll be in good shape.

And then here’s the latest test of a new (to me) product from Smooth-on that has a much firmer feel than the test results we showed at Maker Faire Bay Area 2010.

And here’s how they look in this newest prototype case:

My camera (soon to be my *old* camera) somewhat exaggerates the brightness, but it’s still very readable.

I wasn’t able to de-gas the silicone, and it really really needs that to achieve the water-clear property it’s capable of, however, the bubbles serve as a very effective diffuser of the LED light from underneath. The only drag is that while I was able to get relatively few big bubbles in the casting, there were still some. Degassing would solve that, but it would be almost a thousand dollars in new machinery to do that. So I’m not sure if this is the direction I want to go in, but it’s a possibility. Testing it out has helped to at least answer the questions in my head about whether this is something we *should* do. The answer is still “Hmmmmm I dunno yet” but at least now that’s because we can try using the prototype and see how it performs. Maybe it will be an option we offer.

Progress is slow but definitely still happening. Along with determining if silicone buttons are doable, I’ve been working on how I can produce cases at home instead of farming them out, or having to get up to techshop and the serious hassle that is to get time in on the laser. My CNC router has been put to hard labor and here are some of the preliminary results:

here’s an early test. many things wrong.

Here’s the results of about 3 tests later. Much closer. I’ve solved some of the hardest problems, now I just need to get a workflow going and I think I’ll be in good shape.

And then here’s the latest test of a new (to me) product from Smooth-on that has a much firmer feel than the test results we showed at Maker Faire Bay Area 2010.

And here’s how they look in this newest prototype case:

My camera (soon to be my *old* camera) somewhat exaggerates the brightness, but it’s still very readable.

I wasn’t able to de-gas the silicone, and it really really needs that to achieve the water-clear property it’s capable of, however, the bubbles serve as a very effective diffuser of the LED light from underneath. The only drag is that while I was able to get relatively few big bubbles in the casting, there were still some. Degassing would solve that, but it would be almost a thousand dollars in new machinery to do that. So I’m not sure if this is the direction I want to go in, but it’s a possibility. Testing it out has helped to at least answer the questions in my head about whether this is something we *should* do. The answer is still “Hmmmmm I dunno yet” but at least now that’s because we can try using the prototype and see how it performs. Maybe it will be an option we offer.