some junk we like
Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
Well it was a long fun night. We had technical problems and came up with great solutions. It was great, and I hope we get to do it again next year. Here’s an hour long video of us playing. Sorry for the lack of light. You get an idea of what was going on, though. It’s available in 720p… and the sound is better at that resolution.
Here’s the flyer for us playing at SubZERO 2011!! As long as the rain waits until Saturday to show up, it’s going to be crazy awesome! Be there! 
Thanks again to Matthew Gamez for the great photo!
When I have a bit more time, I’ll post a video, but I just couldn’t locate mechanically fastening LRF’s to the specs I need. So I drew up a concept on some paper, redrew it in illustrator, exported it to dxf, imported it to sheetcam, and cut a casting mold. I used the smooth-on shore hardness 40 silicone since I’ve decided it’s too tough to work with for my buttons… Turned out pretty good! Maybe a little too tall. But it will be easy enough to slice off this mold and try again. I’m loving the time from concept to iteration. Very fast!! And I’m not committed to hundreds of failed designs. Just a couple few. I’ll even use these for experimental projects.
Pretty good! This case is a “scratch and dent” kind of situation, so I feel pretty good about how the silicone buttons turned out with the new casting mold.
Research and development continues with cutting (and recutting, and recutting) the new silicone button casting mold. I’ll be verifying the dimensions tonight, but things are moving along nicely. I may be able to get one of the new v4.51 boards close to fully assembled. Which I am very
much looking forward to. The last major task is to engineer a jig to hold a dremel flex shaft that will attach to my cnc machine. This will let me cut a hole for the USB jack with precision and repeatability on the case. After that, I’ll be able to kick into a higher gear for producing units and kits. Whew!
Fail. 
a sea of machineable wax chips. This mold would end in disaster.
Present and future casualties of my learning process
Try number 3. This one went well after 5 days of chipping away at it.
Smooth-on dragonskin-30, a two part a/b platinum cure silicone, in the happiest place on earth: a beatseqr button mold
It. Looks. GOOD!
sCCweet (cheesily said: “shweet”) for the Korg iMS-20 is a MaxMSP compiled application for mac os x that connects to your iMS-20 app through your existing MIDI connection (figure that out ahead of time). It randomizes the parameters of the iMS-20 at an adjustable rate so you can explore different combinations of settings that you might otherwise never run into on your own. It’s pretty random. There aren’t a lot of controls. 
Think of it as a spelunking tool for this synth. Enjoy!
We will be playing throughout the night at the 2011 SubZERO street festival, June 3rd, 2011. Check out the website for more info: http://www.subzerofestival.com/
Here’s us playing at the south bay music swap event in may 2011… I had a lot more footage, but this clip has all three of us in it, so I figured it would be cool to post. I shot it with my gopro hd hero, hence the exxxttrrreeeeme wide angle. Enjoy!
This clip goes on up to 720p… 
youtube has smiled upon me, so I can upload looooonger movies.
Wow, we had a blast playing at WORKS’ new location on 365 Market street, downtown san jose last night!! We were joined by a talented group of painters and a huuuge crowd. It was awesome. There’s some photos and video coming later… but for now, here’s the audio:
Haptic Synapses live at Works/san jose 2011-05-06
If you’re like me, you probably want to know what the modern device fluxamasynth arduino shield sounds like. I decided I would take a risk and pick one up without having … almost any idea of what it sounded like. It’s relatively affordable and runs right on top of an arduino… theoretically speaking, a lot to like about this kind of product. There are some issues that I’m waiting to hear back on (software serial) before I can really dig deeply into it as something I’d use in my live act, but… here’s what it sounds like:
so, do yourself a favor so you can follow along. Open this page up in a new tab:
http://wiki.moderndevice.com/pmwiki.php?n=MD.ListVoices
then hit the play button below to listen to 64 notes of the first bank of 128 different voices of the fluxamasynth shield. I just realized that I hit the record button while I was uploading a new firmware… so when you hear the “piano” start playing… that’s when you start reading down the list of voices on the other web page:
fluxamasynth_audio_samples_bank0.mp3
We were invited to play at the South Bay Music Swap and had a great time yesterday!! Here’s the audio:
haptic synapses live at south bay music swap may 1, 2011
The good news is that after I received my new boards, I was able to put one together and everything pretty much worked reasonably well. Well enough to use as demo units. 
So I have at least one more demo unit that I’ll be completing within the next month or so.
The not-entirely-bad news is that I did find some aspects of the board that I evaluated to be sub-optimal, so I’ve made a handful of changes and have submitted the design for manufacturing. I’m hoping to see those boards by the middle of next week.
This was my first ever project using Eagle cad, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. The learning curve was ok for me. I don’t have any professional experience doing this stuff, so I guess Eagle is easy enough. It’s a little tough at the beginning, but once you get into the groove of getting your parts created in a library, you’re good to go.
I pretty much took it as a given that I’d have some kind of critical bug or wiring error that I’d have to eat the costs of. The errors I found weren’t wiring problems, they were problems with drill sizes. All of the wiring was 100% accurate and functional. I ponied up for the autorouter, and I’m glad I did. I was able to move some things around on the layout, adjust some of the my fail-over pins and pads, re-run the autorouter, and was back to being in the fabrication queue with my board house within a couple of hours. Some people just don’t like eagle’s autorouter, but for me it’s awesome. I have something like 500 holes on my board and the autorouter did the job in about 2 minutes. Easily worth the cost. so I’m feeling like I can go ahead and work on the manufacturing optimizations I’ve been thinking about for pre-assembled units without having to worry about give up all of the hard work I put into the last functional layout.
So, some highlights on this round of boards:
So … after a a few months of cooling the jets and learning eagle, I’m back to full speed ahead again.
My brother in law posted a really cool video of him playing a new song with beatseqr and Ableton Live… check it out!
Yeeeeah, check this video out! This is my friend DJ Mojo in L.A. He was a major guy in the underground electronic music scene in the 90′s, and since then has been documenting the history of our slice of the musical history spectrum, thinking very deeply about new music interfaces, producing remixes, and mix sessions. Here Mojo is demoing Beatseqr on a Windows machine using the Sonar DAW. Awesome!!
Find Mojo on Facebook, YouTube, and Soundcloud
version 4.5 has been submitted for a limited test run. Here are the improvements:
0. using eagle cad pro, so that means I now have schematics!
1. highly rectilinear PCB component placement. Obey the grid.
2. surface mount headers for critical pins on the arduino mega. assuming I can get them soldered easily, this will solve the major assembly problem I was embarrassed by on previous versions. (H/T: Kevin… thanks for bringing these to my attention)
3. improved hackable mini protoboard area.
4. improved hackable pins on arduino mega headers.
5. holes for support legs on faders.
6. improved spacing of ledtacts and associated resistors.. should make assembly a little easier.
7. moved the arduino mega’s USB port closer to the edge of the board.
8. WAY improved beatseqr branding on the board.
9. silkscreen on both sides!
10. improved extra pin access to faders and potentiometers.
11. squeezed a piece of art onto the board. It is contained inside the LCD cutout area, so as long as I don’t plow right into it, it should be a really cool limited edition. (5 pieces)
12. included holes to mechanically affix the arduino mega to the board. The units I’ve shipped so far have had problems staying plugged in, and this should solve that problem.
Otherwise, this version, pin-out-wise, is the same as version 4. I’ll be working on changing some things from here, but this version was designed to get me back up to speed on my new tool set.
No jokin’ around. I barely have a clue what’s going on with Cadsoft Eagle. I had never used it for anything before this version of beatseqr, so I have no idea what the results are going to be. I’ll have to retool just about every other aspect of production as a result of making the switch from Advanced Circuits’ PCB Artist on windows to Eagle CAD on the Mac, but I think this is going to pay off in the long run. I want to start making mutations of this board, and I just couldn’t see the way forward any more with PCB Artist. Ironically, Advanced Circuits still had the best price for the PCB fabrication needs I have at this time, so not a total loss for them.
So, now I wait for my submission to clear DFM checks and head into production. Then I wait for my boards to show up. Then I need to build one out and verify everything works. If it does, then I have to redesign the CNC tooling for the PCB cutouts and the case completely, then redesign the silicone button mold and produce it in machinable wax. I have no idea what the state of my silicone parts are in, so could be ugly on that front.
There are a couple few other things I need to figure out too. I probably need to reorder some parts. I haven’t found LRF support that I like. Nothing seems to stick to this PCB case, so I’ll have to source some I can mechanically fasten to the case or, much worse, fabricate a solution myself.
Anyway, three of these units will be probably be available for USD$349 plus shipping and export duties where applicable. It’s going to take me a while to dial all the fabrication steps in, but hopefully by the end of april 2011, there will be some units available.
