noise embedded.

Midi moose, revision 2 One night I was jamming with my synthesizers. Digitakt was generating beats and sending midi to Acid Moose. I also added modular synth to the mix but getting it in sync with the rest of the gear was cumbersome. I had to connect midi to my midi2cv module, program a midi track with steady 16th notes and use the gate signal as a clock. I started wondering why isn't it as easy as syncing a midi device to Digitakt? I pretty soon realized it can be! I already have an arduino doing other midi stuff inside my midi thru magic box and it had plenty of io pins free! Drill a hole for the connector, solder some wires and write some code and the modular will be in sync with midi! Original Midi Moose post is available here:  http://noiseembedded.blogspot.com/2019/04/midi-moose-midi-thru-with-twist.html If it's worth doing it's worth overdoing! As there was plenty of io pins free and I have plenty of gear to sync I decided to add more than one clock output. ...

SMD Soldering for Real! As I mentioned in my earlier post  I'm currently trying to learn SMD soldering. After successfully completing two dummy practice boards it was time to try a real project. I had ordered four Mutable Instruments clone boards from  https://www.amazingsynth.com/  and Ripples was the easiest so it became the first victim. Sourcing the Components Sourcing SMD parts is all new to me. Capacitors have all kinds of weird material codes, resistors have unfamiliar wattages etc. Luckily amazingsynth.com provides mouser BOMs so you get almost all parts to the shopping cart with a click or two. I will eventually get familiar with SMD parts but at this stage I'd rather not add any more difficulty to the build by ordering wrong components.  Unfortunately potentiometers are not included and jacks need to be ordered elsewhere. I happened to have plenty of thonkiconn jacks from Thonk  and also some potentiometers. Unfortunately it later turned out...

DIY kits and literature Bjooks and DIY kits Every now and then I had seen pictures of the beautiful and super interesting Push Turn Move book by Kim Bjørn:  https://www.pushturnmove.com/ . Unfortunately it's not available as an eBook and the price has been too high for me because of the shipping costs. Some time ago Bjørn launched the Kickstarter campaign for his third book Pedal Crush . All the buzz it generated in social media led me once again to the Push Turn Move web page. This time I was delighted to find our local DIY music electronics store Uraltone in the reseller list. Of course I had to buy both of the already published "Bjooks" immediately and while at it I decided to buy some Uraltone eurorack DIY kits too. I have wanted a spring reverb since the days I got my first electric guitar and another mixer in my eurorack wouldn't harm. After a short bike ride to Uraltone I had my back bag full of reading and soldering! Support your local! Uralkit Spring...

Midi Moose. Midi Issues Everywhere After finalizing the Acid Moose 303 clone build my midi usage increased significantly. So did my midi problems. Unfortunately I just couldn't get the Acid Moose midi interface working reliably. Sending too many messages made it freeze and the whole device had to be rebooted. I tried changing opto-isolators, crystals, pretty much everything around the pic microcontroller but nothing helped. Anything more than simple note on and note off messages would make it fail. Unfortunately that midi implementation is significant part of the sound because it mimics many 303 peculiarities so changing to another microcontroller implementation wasn't an option either. Needless to say the source code is not available. I finally gave up debugging it and decided to add a midi filter in front of it to throw out everything except the bare minumum of needed midi note messages. Around the same time I also bought an Elektron Digitakt sequencer/sampler. ...

Modular Drum Machine? It was yet another boring afternoon at work. I ended up searching for some interesting DIY eurorack kits. I had never considered adding any drum stuff to my modular synth. I have the not so perfect Akai Howling Wolf drum machine in my setup and have been somewhat disappointed with the kick drum of the unit. So when I found the cheap  Sound Force 808 kick diy kit  I just couldn't resist. They also have 808 snare kit available so of course I had to get both. Weird-Valued Vertical Resistors I usually start all pcb builds by soldering the resistors. They are easy to install and are the lowest components. Unfortunately these boards are designed for smaller resistor components. They can be built with normal through-hole resistors but everything needs to be installed vertically. This makes soldering much slower and more painful. I have plenty of resistors and capacitors around and these boards don't use any exotic ICs so I thought I could build th...

As already mentioned in my Going Modular! post my modular synth lives in a standard 19" rack. In addition to eurorack modules I also have other gear installed into the same rack. My first rack was just two 16 unit high rack rails attached to a Yamaha TX81Z rack synthesizer. It was dirt cheap but not very stable and it was practically impossible to move it anywhere. Something had to be done. I'm not really a carpenter and also didn't feel like spending big pile of money on ready-made studio furniture. I had an unused wooden shelf laying around. One day I thought it actually looks like a side panel for a studio rack. After some measurements I realized it's exactly 18 rack units high! So I went to Clas Ohlson and bought another one and ordered 18 unit rack rails. After that it was pretty easy to build a better rack. Clas Ohlson sells wooden panels exactly 18 rack units high! How convenient! This is the level of carpentry I'm comfortable with! I re-us...

Control Voltages, Please!  My original idea was to control my synth with Ableton Live and MIDI but it turned out it's more fun to generate control signals with LFO's and other synth modules. The logical next step was of course a sequencer module. The Arduino based Cavisynth SEQ-UFD was the cheapest DIY project I could find and the specs looked good. Sourcing Headaches and Jumper Wires, Part 2 This module build was pretty much a sequel to my Cavisynth Ardurack build . I had lots of problems with the required part types and ended up using all kinds of ugly hacks. With a small module like Ardurack I could live with that but the SEQ-UFD has so many jacks and pots that I just had to make another order to Cavisynth and get correct components before turning on my soldering iron. SEQ-UFD consists of 3 PCB:s. It uses the same  The Arduino Pro Mini processor module as the Ardurack. Panel under construction All PCB's are directly attached to the panel wit...