robot porn

disassembly orgy

Not only have I been neglecting my nice blog here for too long, I actually have not sat down at my workbench for months now. By miracle, three days off now have given me the opportunity to get back tinkering and making a mess.

So far, I have completely taken apart my beloved 12″ Powerbook because the internal Airport antenna seems to be broken. This little silver sucker consists of millions of little screws and parts. Better use a step-by-step guide like this one at powerbookguide if you attempt something similar. And buy quality 00, 0 and 1 size Phillips screwdrivers so that you don’t ruin a screw and have to drill it out. Yeah. Now that I reduced that fine computer to debris (you have to take it apart 95% to reach the Airport cable), the people at Germany’s biggest Apple reseller Gravis tell me they cannot sell me spare parts. Damn.

Luckily I could distract myself by taking apart a Playstation 2 TFT monitor by Joytech which are available for about 20 Euros on ebay now. These must be the cheapest way to get a small TFT display now (5,6″ diameter). I planned to use it as a small mobile monitor for a C64 running Prophet64.

Upon disassembling I discovered that one of the PCBs inside was much larger than the screen (a Sharp LQ6AN101 [datasheet]) and because of that rehousing everything in a smaller case would be not as easy as expected. Luckily, the mighty internets have solutions for everything. By reading this thread (in German) I found out that the big PCB contains no circuitry needed for the screen. By resoldering a lot on tiny smd pads you can actually drive the Sharp display only using the smaller PCB which contains everything to convert the CVBS input to the RGB signals the display needs. Neat. 20 Euros and a quiet afternoon give you a nice little display. I’ll shop for a case tomorrow.

Actually, if I was a VJ, I’d definitely invest 60 Euros for three screens (and, say, a quiet weekend) and build my own rackmount triple video screen like the Numark VM03 (street price about 700 Euros). But I’m not a VJ and I noticed that the urge to build things I don’t need can be helpfully remedied by putting it on my to-do list which of course will never be worked off. (But if you are a starving Berlin VJ who likes not-quite-professional looking contraptions prone to failure, give me a call. I might as well do stuff like that for a living.)

So, until that’s done, my TV-B-Gone kit I bought from Mitch at 24c3 has to wait. I already built it and plan to conceal in a plastic mockup digital camera (those they have in store displays who look like the real thing but will fail to amaze the successful thief; I once bought six of them on ebay, please don’t ask why). Something is not working yet, I’ll have to check the forums why my infrared leds don’t blink remote control messages but light up constantly.

And if that’s done I might look into fixing my new oscilloscope, which of course is not new at all, but an old east german RFT EO 213 2-channel scope. The range switches are all dirty, I guess, so far I only found one setting where the calibration square wave works, and only after wiggling the knob a lot. So if that is fixed I can finally use the oscilloscope itself to track down the failure in an electric organ someone gave me to repair. And the next instrument, an (also east german) Vermona Piano-Strings e-piano, arrived at my doorstep today and also needs a thorough cleaning of some contacts as well as of the whole thing itself… and also the spring reverb in my Philicorda 751 organ still is not fixed…

Happy times.

Singing Robot by Maywa Denki

Sometimes I wonder if there is anything left to invent or build. Most likely there is some guy in Japan who already did it:

(via Mr. Future via BoingBoing)

Real software.

I like that:

Crocheted Atari 2600 with “Pitfall” on the screen. Atari by Christine Domanic, picture taken by The Urban Spaceman (via MAKE: Blog).

“I believe that worms will be writing the pop hits of the future.”

Don’t watch this if you don’t like slimy worms.

Direct link.

Super 8 not crappy enough? Try printing.

Sometimes I wonder why I don’t come up with ideas like this one – it’s just so obvious once you see it:

Jesse England prints out Super 8 and 16mm film strips using a normal inkjet printer and transparency film sheets. After some manual assembly (cutting the strips, punching the sprocket holes) he ends up with a short length of film actually watchable with a standard projector.

The quality clearly doesn’t match commercial film recorders, but it’s a nice and artistic way to visualize the medium itself, especially in the realm of using modern technology to create an old medium, showing the deficiencies of both of them. Someone should hack a printer to automate the process of printing/perforating these strips.

(via BoingBoing)

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.

Envelope generators

The great GetLoFi blog recently featured the Bugcrusher downsampling circuit by Tom Bugs who suggested in the post’s comments to get the needed AD781 chip for free (usually about $10) via Analog Devices‘ free sample offer (they send you up to three chips as free samples).

So I ordered two AD781s and one AD633 for this ring modulator thing. They are sent from different shipping centers and the single AD633 arrived yesterday. See if you can spot it on the picture. Should I feel bad now for saving $25 worth of chips and at least the same amount on international shipping? I guess not.

An ephemeral machine with built-in dysfunctions

I saw this leaflet on a bulletin board at university. Sounds interesting. Maybe someone with a real understanding of electronics can help him? I guess I should ask him about his project in some months to see what he made and how long it lived.