robot porn

That’s the spirit

Just found this in my local newspaper. Here’s an English source:

A Bosnian hospital patient spent seven hours repairing hospital machinery so his operation could go ahead. Doctors had told car mechanic Slobodan Mocevic, 56, his operation to remove a kidney stone was cancelled because of faulty equipment. Mocevic asked to borrow a set of tools and then stripped down and repaired the Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy machine at the hospital in Kasindol. (source)

The German name for that machine is equally great: Nierensteinzertrümmerer.

1 year of robot porn

1 year already. I hoped to be able to post more stuff but there’s so much else in life to take care of apart from blogging. Thanks to the geeks at nerdish for hosting this blog. Anyway, please keep checking back here and enjoy this vintage piece of centerfold robot porn:

(Source)

Cheap DIY drum trigger converter: The Triggerlution

It’s hacking time again. My friend Fabian is the drummer in our band and we both thought about building some kind of drum trigger-to-MIDI solution, as cheaply as possible. Commercial plug-and-play solutions are expensive, but we have two cheesy 1990 Yamaha DD-11 digital drum sets (pdf manual). These are quite cheap and have eight trigger pads and MIDI out (and that’s what we need; of course you can play the 100 built-in rhythm and accompaniment sets if you’re into casiocore music).

The plan now was to check if the built-in drum pads can be substituted by regular professional pads like Roland’s V-Drum pads. Actually they work like a charm and so we began taking apart the first DD-11.

As you can see, the DD-11’s eight pads are made of aluminum discs covered with rubber. A simple piezo buzzer converts the hits into short current peaks. Commercial or diy drum pads (like this tutorial at the eDrum project shows) work absolutely the same way. For this project, we only want the DD-11 circuitry and will abandon the orginal case, built-in loudspeakers and trigger pads (which we will keep for future projects).

We hurried a little with this first version, so we kept all the internal electronics. When I do the second conversion, I’ll try to leave out the original amp circuit as well. The amp and power supply circuits are a single module and I could not yet figure out what parts can be left out.

The green mainboard is the most important item here. The small board on the right holds the power switch and volume slider. The brown board on top contains the MIDI in/out (left part) and power/amp circuits (right part). We had a little trouble finding a proper case for the electronics. Most commercially available cases are too small or too expensive and we finally settled for a sturdy metal tool case from Bauhaus (diy store) for 7 Euros only.

I’ll skip the build process itself because drilling holes is not really interesting. Here’s a summary of what we did:

• get everything needed out of the original case, desolder everything else
• cut out the original button/display area and reattach it to the board
• solder eight 1/4″ TRS jacks to the original pad connectors
• desolder all original jacks and relocate those needed to new jacks in the case (MIDI out, Audio out)

There’s no way to change settings without opening the case, but Fabian decided that would be okay for know. The device just starts as soon as a power line is connected, always using its “00″ setting with a certain fixed allocation of pad number to MIDI note. The sound to be played on that event will be set on the sampler to be connected to the MIDI out. In the end there’s no use for opening the case.

Fabian dubbed his new spanking red contraption the Triggerlution. Please ask in the comments if you want to know more. I just found this description of a similar conversion (putting a DD-11 into a 19″ rack) on the net. He did what I was also thinking about for Triggerlution v2: Relocation of the keypad area by rebuilding it on a new board.

NitroTracker now first wireless MIDI sequencer of the universe

0xtob has released the new 0.3 version of his Nintendo DS NitroTracker, now with full bidirectional DSMIDIWifi functionality! w00t! The wait for my DS launcher card becomes longer every second now…

Basically, NitroTracker will now act as a wireless sequencer for any software (or computer-connected hardware) instrument. I believe this is a first. It’s not the wheel, but the first wireless MIDI sequencer software evar (though you can use M-Audio’s MidAir technology similarly).
Vice versa, NitroTracker now plays back samples via incoming MIDI note messages. I can’t think of a sensible application for that feature right now, but surely the crazy people on the interwebs will put it to good use.

I’m sure there are legal reasons to consider, but I really can imagine that you could sell a bundled DS launcher card pre-loaded with this and other software some time in the future, say NAMM/Musikmesse 2008. Running homebrew and all that diy fumbling can be a little to arcane to some musicians and I guess there always is a target group that just wants a boxed product.

Controllers in the house

Happy 2007 everyone. Look what I did with the cash the tooth fairy (or whatshisname) put in my stockings for that recent public holiday:

An M-Audio Oxygen8 v2 MIDI Controller (25 keys, 8 knobs and some switches) and a pink Nintendo DS. Yes, pink.

The geek friends’ peer pressure (and the fact that 0xtob made the fantastic wireless MIDI software DSMIDIWifi; basically only that) finally convinced me that I needed a DS too. Still waiting for my R4DS card that will enable me to use all that fine homebrew software, though. Orders from Hong Kong seem to take some time due to the recent earthquake in Taiwan. Until then I have to resort to Brain Age as my only (borrowed) game.

The Oxygen works nicely and came with a “lite” version of Ableton Live which I’m now trying to get addicted to so that at one point I just have to invest the 260 Euros for an upgrade to the full version. Talk about follow-up costs.