/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>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/

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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

Hey guys,

I finally finished my synth project I started like over a year ago.

Not much to update:

Box #2 is sturdy as fuck, thats good. Panel #3 got populated today. I started putting knobs on Box #2. I was hoping I'd be able to finish today, but, I dont actually have enough parts. So I put in an order and it'll be like another week.

I was cleaning our my storage. I found an old surface mount proto-prototype of my project. I broke it with a sledge hammer before throwing it out.. Pic related.

Spent the day laser cutting and painting. I exhausted my wood supply, so I'll have to get more tomorrow. Although I am working my hardest, it doesnt seem likely I'll be able to finish tomorrow. Laser cutting a bit more wood aside, I just have to wire the PCBs into Box #3 and it will be fully functional. Box #2 just needs some more wood assembly and it will be fully functional.

Heres a pic of today's progress

This morning I got to laser cutting the sides of Box #2, but I didnt have some files, so I had to design it from scratch. Nothing I was cutting worked. It was pretty frustrating, I hadnt experienced that level of failure in a while.

Anyway, I got my files, so next cut I do should work.

Besides that I made this today. Its a low pass filter.

Made enough PCBs for three boxes, although Box #2 is not complete.

Finished wiring up the front panel. I'd keep working, but I am beat. Next up, laser cutting the side panels. Box #2 is surprisingly close to being finished.

I was hoping I could finish all this by time school starts, which is in 5 days. Lets see if I can build a whole synth unit that time frame.

>>509578

Hmm, I wouldnt say they are hard to make, but there are a lot of steps that if done wrong will make the whole process a pain in the ass, and there are a lot of steps in general. I have done trial and error to find the best way to do it, and in a month I am going to give a talk on what I have learned.

Bonk. Forgot my pic.

Made four boards. That should be enough.

I painted these lightly. The advantage of this is that when the laser burns the paint, there is less grime to clean. However, when the coat of the paint is lighter, its also inclined to break off, which it did on one oscillator. Fortunately, I anticipate this and make more oscillators than necessary per board.

Laser is back online.

I am going to spend today lasering stuff so that I can spend the next few days working on this even if the laser goes down again.

Whelp, laser is bork. Wont be working on this for a few days. Today I fooled around with other circuits to see what works. I have an idea for a low pass filter device. I tried to make an LPB-1, but it didnt work.

>>507264

Yeah sounds pretty similar to what I have, and my oscillator is pretty similar to the wein bridge oscillator too..

I use a few potentiometers to tune the oscillators, and I make the potentiometers accessible in case I feel like tuning it differently.

>>507208

Oops, forgot my trip