Version 4.51 silicone button array development

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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!

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Fail. 🙁

 

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a sea of machineable wax chips. This mold would end in disaster.

 

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Present and future casualties of my learning process

 

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Try number 3. This one went well after 5 days of chipping away at it.

 

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Smooth-on dragonskin-30, a two part a/b platinum cure silicone, in the happiest place on earth: a beatseqr button mold

 

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It. Looks. GOOD!

 

sCCweet for korg iMS-20

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sCCweet for the Korg iMS-20

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!

Download “sCCweet for the Korg iMS-20″

Modern Device fluxamasynth shield audio examples

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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

beatseqr 4.5 is alive

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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.

beatseqr version 4.5, assembled PCB

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:

  • the board is now properly branded with the beatseqr logotype. Woo.
  • I took a risk on putting holes on the board for the support legs on my faders, and they work great.
  • I took a risk on putting offset pads on the board in order to use surface-mount board headers to interface with the arduino mega.. and they work pretty well!
  • silk screening on two sides worked as I figured it would. I thought it through and reversed all the text on the b-place layer, and that was a good guess. I missed a bunch of stuff on the t-place layer that should have gone on the b-place layer, so that’s corrected in version 4.51. Lesson learned: change the color of the b-place layer… that will make it easier to see what’s on that layer.
  • I put some holes on the board to line up with the mounting holes on the arduino mega, and they lined up perfectly
  • Totally surprised, pleasantly, that my boards came back routed to my irregular shape, exactly as specified in my design. that’s a major post-production step that I just don’t have to worry about. I’m very happy about that.
  • mounting holes for the project case lined up perfectly. This bullet and the one above are epic, because when I was using my board house’s own PCB layout program, I couldn’t specify the irregular board outline I need, and it wouldn’t let me put my mounting holes as close to the edge as I needed them. Both problems solved by going to eagle cad. Plus I can get silkscreening on the bottom layer at no additional cost, so heck yeah.
  • all of the drill sizes that I ported over from my other design worked very well.

So … after a a few months of cooling the jets and learning eagle, I’m back to full speed ahead again.

DJ Mojo drum and bass demo

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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