Monday, December 21, 2009

case and phaser







phaser




Friday, December 11, 2009

mmm biscuits

biscuitting the wood for joing

glueing the boxs together


set-em up!!
about to be sanded and finished :)

Monday, November 23, 2009

case building

so i bought this awesome wood awhile ago
it is from this reconditioned, refound and recycled wood place in melbourne called urban salvage
i found a whole bunch of blackbutt flooring and grabbed all the nice bits

so over the last few weeks i have been cutting and glueing the boards so they dont have tongue and grooves showing and so they are deep enough for my case. it has been fun. i learnt how to use a band saw and how to join wood.



here is a picture of the joined blackbutt planks, it is beautiful looking wood imo. i wanted to avoid getting red or yellow coloured wood as i wanted the case to be a greyish tan or a dark chocolate brown. since my panels are clean alu with black features i thought red /yellow shades wont compliment whereas dark or greyish wood will excentuate the panneling. the cool thing about blackbutt is it will naturally turn a dark blackish brown when exposed to the sun.

so this weekend i mitred all the boards and cut them to size

i used a box strap thingy and tested how all the mitres went and im happy to say it all went really well. i was stressing so hard about screwing up the mitres.



Thursday, October 22, 2009

trip out

progress thus far


progress thus far

(back row)
mankato w. led mods
-still got sync mod to work out
-no rush though

supercontroller
-need to fix some bugs in the noise and S&H, ie all the sn chip functions :(
-need some on-on-on switches, hopefully they will solve the issues

dual buchla 291 bp vactrol filter with hp/lp mods and parallel mode mod
-finished but might swap some vactrols in one as it sounds a bit flat

quad buchla 281 vc-ar enevelope function generator
-working :)

(front row)
ken stone wave multiplier w/ grinder vactrol mods and active ring modem (dual real ring mod)
-wave mult works, vactrol mod works on breadboard but not hooked up to grinder yet
-active modem needs parts
-pcbs to be mounted and wired



ken stone analog computer (pulse divider, asr, XOR XNOR, comperator, random pulse from digi noise)
-pcbs filled, needs wiring and mounting
-need black bananas



klee sequencer w/ A-B mod & mfos quantiser
-klee stuff and semi-working while mounted on test panel, needed new cmos chip but fine i think
-quantiser stuffed
-lots of wiring
-need black bananas



quad low pass gates, with AB, CD, ABCD mix outs
-need to wire it up



Once i have wired these up i will move to my vco/lfo bank which includes JH Living Vcos (3 solid vcos with linear detune), 3 x teezer Thru zero maddness module and a dual Tom Wiltshire vc-lfo board built by haxter with the additional 4 basic lfos. Looking forward to actually making noise. hehe. Oh well, i sold my cgs vcos to buy a delay pedal hehe totally my own fault.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

dual tom wiltshire / haxster vc-lfo panel



here is the draft

had 6 lfos on the 4U panel

i think it is a bit busy
i might swap the sync depth rotart and the wave form select pot so the shapes graphics have some more space. clutter!

it is probably hard to work out what is going on
the small black circles are for switches
the next size up are LEDs
and the largest (in the middle rows) are bananas

Friday, October 2, 2009

modular progress



just to show that some things are happening and im not all talk

klee re-panel

new vcos



dah da dah da dah dah dahhhhhh

Sunday, April 5, 2009

boxotrix (harty feast) panel construction

Now that im getting toward the end of populating this beast of a pcb it was time to get around to making a panel. I made the panel as the construction lit mentions that to start working out the final values you need all the pots to be attached. Im not actually exactly sure how im going to case this one up yet. Currently im hoping to have banana and 1/4 inch inputs. As you can see from the picture below the bananas are on the top of the panel. I also want a more traditional format as i dare say ill use this doing gigs with just my laptop / drum machines and various other non-banana gear. So im thinking ill have a 2 rows of 1/4 or even 1/8 inch jacks on the back panel.





Here you can see the populated 3mm aluminium panel. There are a few missing panel components which i hope to have soon. Note the low profile rotary switches from allied electronics.



This project had a lot of hard to find stuff. It feels really good getting toward the end of it. I still have to get the THAT4301. It has been left till last due to the extreme price and ordering difficulties. I also could not get 5k1 3300ppm tempco resistors. So i just used normal 5k1 resistors.

Hopefully by the next post ill have the panel competely done :)

Thursday, April 2, 2009

boxotrix >> harty feast

new box-o-trix layout w/
new project name
new distortion module names
different look
roughly same layout but 1/2 an inch more in height
crazy fonts :)

here is w/ components and then underneath just the silk



i was a little underwhelmed with the look of my last revision of the box-o-trix design. so i gave it an extreme make over. I like it now. I think giving all the distortion/gate/compressors verb titles, even if they are not really all that well associated in effect character, a sense of association and relation. This has been sent to print so just need my final batch of components and she will be almost done! Wish i could say the same for my 808, that project is costing a fortune.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

working hard for the modules



While i've made minimal posts here of late i've been rolling
Thumbs up to having a job now .. income really helps sdiy progression
Deliveries started hitting my door a while back and been busy getting my system all together
I have to say i love packages hitting my door
A little surprise inside each one, well almost

Here are the knobs and rotarty switches i ordered from Allied Electronics. I also bought 25 vtl5c3s hehe, you will soon see why!



After a dabble with clay based photo paper i have realised that pnp blue is really worth every cent
Ink transfers onto copper and aluminium is SO much easier.
Quicker, more reliable and a better outcome every single time.

The paper technique meant that you had to wear away the top layer of paper above the laser ink and this was a time consuming problematic process. i spent a few nights trying to get a couple buchla 291 pcbs done and only 1 worked and the outcome was 60% good at best/ props to kids who can get this method working. But at the quantitiy of pcbs i have to make i have realised that Pnp Blue is the only way. I bought a bulk amount from tom (BugBrand) who was nice enough to sort me out with a good price, still expensive though :/ . Tom is such a champion!!

The other thing i have worked out is that Staedtler Lumocolour pens are the best resist touch up pens for Etching. In some cases i've found it to be sturdier than the laser toner! It is a hell of a lot harder to clean off the etched pcbs, that is for sure. I found out about the use of these pens while trawling the internet, (as all of us sdiy kids do :), and some collective tested a bunch of resist mediums and this was meant to be the best. So that is confirmed, seriously use your sharpies for drawing on sleeping people and go buy red lumocolour pens.


I've been lots etching pcbs for people recently
I think I've spent about 10 hours at the drill press over the last month
In fact i'm writing this post while procrastinating drilling more :/ :)

Still got a bunch more pcbs to go, some for me, some for others
here are the 4 of 6 buchla 291 pcbs i have to make ( 2 for me, 4 for others )
and also 10 of the 12 buchla 292 pcbs (none for me, i have 4 of the pro pcbs made by thomas white .. but these lpg designs by matthias fonik have the resonance modifications from the t.white design, just no input mixers)




So i'm finally at the stage to etch my panels. I etched a panel with Fe2 last week and it came out a bit dodgy. I learnt that Fe2 reacts with alu pretty in a very noxious way, the Fe2 mixture turned into a bubling mud steaming with intense gas !!! It ate through all the spots that i had touched up with shapie and so the panel came out pretty acidalicous :) The module was a tube vca and i made a pretty smooth looking frac panel design for it, i think the tube gods wanted it to look a but meaner hehe.


So at the moment i'm waiting on final deliveries to finish a bunch of projects. Just some rare stuff. Need to get a bunch of more panel compoenets. While it is going to be expensive, i know i am going ot enjoy every single delivery :) heh

so...

Waiting for panel:
2 x cgs vco
4 x buchla 281 envelopes
2 x thomas henry vca
4 x thomas white/buchla lpg
klee sequencer
cgs Wavemultipier (recently fixed)


Needs more components:
mb808 (finished up Seq, just need to complete a few more drums)
box'o'trix (waiting on hard to find parts, next week hopefully, apart from the that4301 $)
mbhp PIC burner (regulator and PIC + sockets)
1 x buchla 291 (rare transistors and zeniers)


Need to etch:
2 more lpg boards
2 x buchla SOU (1 set for me and 1 for a friend)
3 more buchla 291 pcbs
gameboy midi interface (i just designed a pcb for it)

Currently working on:
pcb layout for buchla 257 cv processor
my modular case

Sunday, March 1, 2009

TAU PHASER STOMP DESIGN

since im making the krautrock phaser within a stompbox format for a friend i thought that i would like one myself. i really regret not making one of the mini-modular cases for myself. unfortunately i don't have another krautrock phaser module (yet) so i made a similar design for my tau phaser.

here is the result


Sunday, February 22, 2009

buchla and haible

got some more bits rolling after the huge futurlec order arrived
ontop of this i also finished a few modules on the 808pcb and 1/2 populated my mankato vcf




im about to mock up my case for the krautrock phaser
the case will be similar in style to a moogerfooger box
here is the panel design ready to cover some alu



Tuesday, February 10, 2009

box'o'trix case design



here is my revised and completed first draft (click for bigger)
it measures 1.5' high, 4.5' deep, 12.25' long
the power plug will be on the side or i might remove a set of the common ground plugs and put it on the back

i am waiting on a big shipment with almost all of the remaining parts, only a few to go after that so i hope that this box will be completed about the same time as my 808. if all goes well this will be within 3 months.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

update

well i just started at a new job so i can finally think about building my projects again as income is slowly trickling back into my account.

next projects im about to order are

seb francis' box'o'trix (1/2 built as i had most components in stock)
mb808 bd, ac, sn, noise and finish dout/din/main out
low pass gates (4)
th mankato
th vca 1 (2nd one)
buchla 291 bpf (x2)
tau phaser (1/2 build)
krautrock phaser (2/3 built)

im also starting to stock up on the chemicals for the electro etching
and i have a laser printer on the way so i can start simplifing the pcb and panel etching process


and here are some tracks i have been working on

tubby-sans (dub)



gingermiss (deep techno)

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

boxotrix distortion box

got the design rolling for my seb francis boxotrix
im going for a super low profile version
since i am using bananas it makes life a bit easier

here is the faceplate that will sit ontop of a box no wider or longer than it and prob only a inch high to accomodate the filter caps in the psu. i might put bananas on the front and back of the box so it can be plugged in no matter where it is sitting next to your gear






i still need to finish some pot measures for the compressors
but i want to wait to see how the unit works before i commit to anything yet

Monday, January 5, 2009

another new tune



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