/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Excellent!

Looks great...but...

How does it sound?

>>526354

I have been making little demos along the way:

Here is a demo with my prototype:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7TCSNEq1rg

Here is a demo I made after I finished one box:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSb3N9_Ol1w

Here are some sounds I just did today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8DFuD1wBUs&feature=youtu.be

All these clips have pretty poor audio quality. Sorry, its all through a laptop mic. I should also say that in all these videos I am aided a bit by other technology, notably the line 6 DL4.

The machine is polyphonic, and outputs sine waves.

Now what?

In all seriousness, the keys look like the countdown on a predator's suicide bomb.

Gimme one.

>>526374

Well, now that I finished I'll start playing with it. I play the drums a lot, I am looking for someone to play music with.

But with regards to this project, I think I might try and patent it, and then investigate making money off this technology.

Congrats.
It looks quite different than in the beginning. What all those knobs do?

>>526383

If you notice, each knob is in a group of four knobs, vertically arranged. Each group of four maps to a key. The knobs from top to bottom control the following 1. Changes tone from triangle to sine wave, and changes the tone slightly. 2. changes the tone dramatically 3. Changes the tone slightly 4. Volume.

Tuning each oscillator takes turning the first three knobs.

this shit is crazy dude. what kind of music do you want to be making?

>>526397

I originally got into this project because I got interested in music tunings, mainly just intonation. So this instrument is my way of playing in an alternative tuning.

Like, back in the day I would make lots of little songs in just intonation using audacity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fphnHWmOOVU

But quite a lot more than anything else, I play the drums. Like in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Uu-e0aAIM

>>526402
where you based? I make music and would love to do something with someone for a change

http://shitpop-negative.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-part-2

>>526416
Dude, no joke, this shit is crazy. I love this, what is the genre called?

>>526434
idk dude I mostly make hiphop. Thanks though :D if you like the rest of it, feel free to download, I just came out with an album

>>526402
>>526416
>mfw

>>526440
lol

Damn dude, that shit looks pro!

>>526416
I hate that I'm already at the "that's not music that's just noise" stage of life. I'm only 27....that's still young, right?

>>526462
27 more like 72 am I right

>>526462
nah that's not too old I met a 35 year old at a death grips concert, I think you can keep yourself open to music and new ideas despite age.

Fantastic. I remember when you started posting and I skipped the threads and thought you'd never come anywhere near finishing - really glad to be proved wrong.

props for jumping in the deep end and making it to the end!

>>526462
For many people that come here you're still a kid,

As a lover of virtuosis, I think this noise machine is crap. But damn, they look like a alien spaceship panel!

>>526443
>>526443
>>526443
anyone ?

>>526416

Whoa cool! I like your stuff.

I live in Phoenix. You live in San Fransisco?

>>526492
Jameco
Digikey
Tayda
Sparkfun

These are all great websites.

OP what drum pad are you using for this video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7TCSNEq1rg

>>527286

I may be wrong, but are those just boxes with piezos in/on them?

That's the farthest I've certainly ever gotten in respect to drums.

>>527286

Thats an Alesis sample pad I am using.

>>527514

I think the technology is a bit more complicated than just piezos. I suspect piezos are involved with detecting the velocity of the drum stick, but that signal gets sent to a processor of some kind, which does the rest of the work.

>>527519
the input is pretty much as easy as a piezo converting velocities into voltages. The trick is converting those voltages into MIDI. A drum brain, i/o card or box, or similar is needed.
If you have a drum brain, you can build your own drums/pads pretty easily.

>>527522

/r/ing more information on that one (especially /diy/ related.) Google is not cooperating.

>>527522
>>527733

I dont know very much about MIDI, and I dont know what a drum brain is. But I have made electronic drum pads from scratch.

So, a 'piezo' is a strip of material that behaves interestingly under physical pressure. When a piezo is compressed it gives off a voltage, and similarly if its fed a voltage it expands. Cheap buzzer speakers are often piezo electric.

What I have been able to do, is route the piezo to the pin of a micro controller (like an Arduino), and program the Arduino to give off a sound if it reads a voltage from the pin.

what does it have?
VCF, VCO'S etc etc? adsr?

>>528756

I do know how piezos work. I've made quite a few electric kazoos in my time. I will have to look up more on drum brains, though.

Hey, OP definitely share a soundcloud or wherever you'll be uploading music you make with this things. I'm super interested in hearing more of it.

>>528756
pcb and scheme?
looks like a nice project. It looks great.

>>526434
Chip bending, noise pop, avant-garde, noise, etc. Take your pick. If you like it, check out the artists Merzbow, Bloody Snowman, or Eats Tapes.

are the keys pressure sensitive ?

>>528778
>>529174

No Voltage controlled oscillators (I dont know what a VCF or an adsr is). Though, if I did this project again I would seriously consider using voltage controlled oscillators.

This is an old diagram of the oscillator I used. This is very similar to the ones I put in my synth, one exception being that the 2.2k resistor to ground is a 10k potentiometer. Also the 3.3uf and .1uf capacitors varied in value. The lower the value, the high the tone. Similarly, the 1.5k and 10k pots will change the tone. If you turn these knobs right, the ocillator outputs a sine wave, otherwise, it outputs a unreliable triangle wave.

The way I made the whole synth, was I made an oscillator for each key. Each key is an arcade button, which has a double pole switch between ground and the output.

>>529222

No, but when I started to work on this project over a year ago I was determined to make touch sensitive keys. The put considerable work into designing nd making these, but I eventually gave up on the idea.

>>529517
Not that guy but a VCF is a voltage controlled filter, a type of active tone control circuit, typically a low pass filter. An ADSR means Attack Decay Sustain Release, a type of envelope. In your case they could be triggered by the arcade buttons to control volume or Voltage Control to the filter (for a wah effect).

Have you considered using force sensing resistors for pressure sensitive keys?

>>529606
>>529517
Also, have you heard of muffwiggler?

Dude, how do you build those chassis? I'm working on a tube amp right now and I'd pay a million pesos for it to look like that.

the fuck is erything in this thread bold now?...

>>529643
did my post fix it?
that was weird.

>>529606

Oh I see. I did make a lopass filter for this machine. And with regards to ADSR, I recently bought a guitar pedal than ramps up the volume of the attack.

Yeah I have fooled around with force sensing resistors a bit. When I began the project I didnt feel confident enough with electronics to make some kind of force dependent volume control. But, that was a while ago. I feel like I could make something like that now.

>>529633

I made the enclosures out of wood, mostly 3/8" birch plywood. I painted sheets of plywood with shellac, then covered them in painters tape. Then with a vector file I designed I used a laser cutter to cut through the wood, and cut through the painters tape to make a stencil. Then I spray painted it black.

No joke, for some amount of money, I'll make you some thing for your tube amp.

especially your threads, Resident /sci/ Economist, are the reason i love /diy/ so much.

i ve been reading them for well over a year and am in awe and jealous of what you have created.

the only audio diy i got done in the past year was bulding a vc-stepsequencer from an runningLED kit.

so mad props for what youve created

if i remember correctly you are operating at some facility that provides tools in return for a monthly fee. how much is it ? what are you required to do if you brake a tool of theirs ? are you obliged to pay up a deposit as an insurance for such an event in the beginning?

>>530095

it depends on what you braked. if you braked something like a small drill bit typically they don't costed you much money.

>>530111
>>530095
Man, I've never known a tool that was so powerful it needed brakes. It seems like if you did brake a tool it would break.

I think I need to get around to making a real demo for the synth. Ive just been kind of busy lately.

>>530095

Yeah! Well, a few things:

The facility is called Heatsync Labs, its in Phoenix Arizona. We are a hacker space, and what that means to us is its a volunteer run workshop space for engineers, computer people or anyone who has any kind of project, personal or commercial.

Its free to the public. You dont need to pay anything to come here and work on stuff. We do have memberships, but its just a way for us to pay the bills. It doesnt entitle you to anything.

Our tool broken tool policy is if you break a tool tell someone about it. All the tools in the space are donated, or bought by the community. So if you break it, then we just dont have it anymore, and someone needs to get a new one.

>>530143

At Heatsync our disc sander has a brake.

>>530168

So I was reading this whole thread and I've seen your project, you've been doing this at HSL right?

>>530186

oh lol I didn't even read the post, I just had noticed >>529711

this wall before, good job, I hope I can see it in person sometime

>>530187
>>530186

Cool! Yeah this whole project has been done in HSL. Feel free to come by and check it out. I am in the lab all the time. If you do, tell me you are from /diy/