Pedal Fighter first play test I have the new PF prototype wired up and working now using the Firmata Arduino firmware and Pure Data on my Ubuntu laptop. I’m using a test patch that I wired up in PD the last time around. I’m using a slightly modified version of the SimpleDigitalFirmata firmware that ships with the Arduino IDE. The…

Pedal Fighter Arduino mounting I mounted the Arduino Uno board to the underside of the Pedal Fighter today. I added the drill layout to my panel drawing in Qcad. I added crosshairs so that I could find the centers when I printed out the template. This seems a little bit hackish, if anyone knows a better way to get the…

Pedal Fighter button layout It’s about time for some updates on the Pedal Fighter project. The buttons are pretty awesome and I’ve finally gotten the correct drill bits for making a prototype. I took a closer look at the buttons once I had them in my hands. It turns out that they use a pretty standard key switch inside, much…

Microcontroller swarms What would you do with a microcontroller that is as small or smaller than an op-amp? I knew that Atmel had a series of tiny AVR chips but I didn’t realize that they went all the way down to a 6 pin device. This is smaller than most dual op-amp packages. I’ve had a few ideas for synth…

Modular distortion from GetLoFi I was reading through some audio tech blogs and I ran across this modular distortion idea from GetLoFi. The idea is to make the actual circuit as small as possible. This reminds me a little bit of the current Arduino boards and how some of the shields and breakout boards are really compact. The other killer…

New Live PA rig I set up a new live electronic music rig the other day to go jam with some friends. I haven’t pulled something like this together in a long time so I made a list and double checked to make sure everything was working in my living room before I took it out. Here are some pics:…

Yamaha CS1x teardown and repair I had a bad button on my Yamaha CS1x recently and I had to tear it most of the way down in order to fix it, so I took a lot of pictures. I haven’t seen a lot of pics on the Web of this synth, so hopefully these pictures help you out if you…

Pedalfighter button selection I’m picking up some new parts for the Arduino PedalFighter project that I started a while back. My initial prototype was kind of disappointing due in part to the quality and size of the buttons that I used. I picked up some small 3/8″ buttons from Halted here in Silicon Valley. They were cheap and proved the…

Arduino USB MIDI workflow Since I re-flashed my Aruduino with the USB MIDI firmware I had to come up with another way of getting my code uploaded to the board. In case you were wondering, the MIDI firmware replaces the USB serial firmware that the Arduino boot loader normally uses to download code to the board. In the past I…

Sending OSC from PD to TouchOSC I’m playing around with some TouchOSC control methods currently. I’m running the fantastic Monome TouchOSC emulation and hoping to control my old PD sequencer with it. I had a few issues getting the Hexler basic.pd demo patch to work, and it was a very simple thing in the end. You can grab their pd…