Archive for April, 2008

Bent 2008 Wrap Up, WTPA v0.9 Assembly Photo Guide

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Heavens!
Back in Chicago, rode hard, put up wet. Bent 2008 (which ruled) and a certain amount of hanging with hipster rocker dudes (get up late, sweaty) resulted in some pretty killer new patches for my lil’ blood.

In the meantime, big propers to the four brave souls who bought up the 0.9 kits! Below, for their benefit, is a really big and slow to load (and unapologetically un-artsy) photo of my kit which shows off where all the components go because my silkscreen layers in the PCB files are still a little crunked up. It’s late, and I just built new linkages for a small robot combine harvester. Really.

WTPA v0.9 in Brooklyn, Kitted

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Brooklyn, 10 hours of sleep later. Debugging on an old friend’s coffee table. Brooklyn is good for a lot of things. You can get any number of tasty and erudite coffee drinks really easily, and the girls are cute (I think — they dress cool enough that I think you sometimes think they are even when they actually aren’t).

Say, however, you coded a resampling routine and realized your gain staging in the analog section was all types of foobar, and you really needed:

a.) a carbon-film resistor kit
b.) your Tek
c.) even a soldering iron.

What would you do?
I’ll tell you what. You’d fix it in software and probably go to a party or eat a falafel, and maybe worry that you weren’t dressed well enough.

Kits for tomorrow. Extra op-amps! Value Added!

WTPA v0.9 First Sample!

Thursday, April 24th, 2008


Those waveforms are snowflakes. It, ladies and gentlemen, samples.
It is a sampler.
It sounds every bit as crusty as I had hoped.

WTPA v0.9 First Audio

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008


Remind me to tell you a story about integer promotion and casting in C one of these nights before bedtime. Until then this yarn and photo about an R2R DAC singing its heart out while lots of little shift registers keep time will have to call the sheep. We blink, we parse, we sawtooth. Now we need the gift of speech. We’re not altogether sure our little LM324 is very linear, but what else is new. Off to dream of assignment operators.

WTPA v0.9 Lives!

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Up, no shorts, and blinking! Blinking wrong, but blinking. The wrenching comparisons to the teenage bildungsroman are just going to keep rolling out, it seems.

Reason enough to retire. Goodnight, Young Werther.