WTPA v0.95 Up and Executing

OK, OK dusty and neglected friends. For you, today: Twinkles!

What does this mean? Well, several things. The most important of which is that the new version 0.95 PCBs are up and executing code. There are 2 MCUs on the new boards that communicate via a UART. Mostly I did this because I wanted to keep this sampler “kit-friendly” (meaning big DIP parts) and ran out of pins on the main MCU to do all the stuff I wanted to do.

What you’re seeing right now is the smaller helper MCU (here an Atmega168, but it’ll end up a 48p or 88p depending on how much I shave down the code) making the lights go. This is his reason for being, in addition to reading the control pot / CV in, the switches, and generating white noise for the clock jitter generator circuit. More importantly, he’s pretty much done. Besides freeing up the main MCU for more important stuff, this extra MCU allows a lot more foofy lighting effects —

I’ve coded in a bunch of little strobe effects and fades and chases that ought to help keep your sampling experience trippy.

More importantly this update means that I’ve got a bigass hole in my freelance work right now and I’m pretty sure I can use it to nail the code/hardware debugging for WTPA once and (almost) for all. There’ll have to be another PCB rev (I’ve found hardware bugs on this one already) but the code should be pretty much exactly portable to the next one.
A couple days ago I set a deadline of, er, tomorrow to get this revision up, sampling, and tested. The code for the main chip is already well underway, and I think this is realistic. Stay tuned…

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