Alesis dual zone snare trigger teardown I recently purchased an Alesis DM6 electronic drum kit. I haven’t posted much about it yet, but one of the things that I was wondering about was how they implemented their dual-zone snare drum trigger. If you hit the stick on the rim of the pad you get a different sound than if you…

Simple USB Midi footswitch using Arduino I wrote about getting USB Midi working on the Arduino recently, and now here is my first attempt at getting it to do something useful. I have a momentary pushbutton installed in a small plastic junction box from the hardware store. I need to update my prototyping techniques notes here, as I’ve begun to…

Arduino USB Midi As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m working on a new foot controller concept (which I’ll reveal soon). As part of my initial research I thought it would be pretty awesome if there was some way to get my controller to show up natively as a USB Midi device instead of using Firmata or some other serial interface which…

Targeting the Atmega48 with Arduino toolchain I’ve been prepping for a new foot controller project that I’m using the Arduino on. I had a few small things that I wanted to note here since It seems that I haven’t written a lot of this stuff up. It so happens that I have a bunch of Atmel AVR Atmega48 microcontroller chips…

Salvaging octal tube socket bases One of the tube amp projects I have in mind lately is to create some kind of instrumentation dashboard for a guitar amplifier. In order to do this I need to create some tube socket adapters that go between the amp and the tubes so that I can measure things like plate voltages and bias…

Duncan amp restore – NOS rectifier tube I’ve gotten back to the Duncan amp restoration project this weekend by grabbing a replacement for my burned out rectifier tube. I had the amp on the bench at the Hacker Dojo a few weeks ago, and with the help of my buddy Fred, we figured out that despite my measuring 600v in…

Testing out the Maxim MAX9768 I recently got some Maxim class D amplifier chips thanks to Michael at Maxim here in the Valley. Along with the MAX9768 parts I scored some development boards, which are already set up with the amp chip, filtering inductors and binding posts. I have a few projects in mind for this. Namely, guitar amps! That’s…

Maxim MAX9768 amp board running through THD hot plate

Tube amp design I’ve been playing around with some different vacuum tube amplifier circuits on the bench recently. However, it’s hard to play around with anything but a starved-plate design given that I don’t have a high voltage power supply on the bench. It’s also hard to provide a proper load for the output tubes since that typically requires a…

Pedal Fighter Pure Data patch In a previous post, I described the physical build process for the Pedalfighter project. I have now played around with getting the software setup going using PD. The process of getting the PD patch working was complicated by lack of documentation on how to work with MIDI messages beyond using the built-in makenote object. The…