Nerdy Texts of Analog and Embedded Systems Wizardry

Just for grins, while I was waiting for the PCBs to come in, I decided to lay out a new design for color synthesis that I’d been fooling around with. This, again, is the gerber file.

The sync and blanking circuits in the above are fairly pedestrian — they’re just an AVR running at 14.318 MHz, which controls a 4051 to gate in the correct resistor values to get sync and blanking levels into 75 ohms. This part is pretty much exactly the same as the circuit from Owen Osborn’s old CA synth (which is a really elegant piece of engineering, I think). The AVR generates the colorburst and color carrier also using a hardware timer to divide the crystal frequency by 4. This means this prototype ain’t gonna do PAL. Sorry.

To my mind, the really interesting thing is the way in which color gets generated. Hue is encoded in analog composite video by _PHASE SHIFT_ of a carrier wave. Someone very smart and very good at electronics figured that out a long time ago. I’ve built synths in past which use the AD724 (lame) and varactor diodes to give continuously variable integration.

The varactors are actually a pretty badass way of doing it — they’re fast and kinda nonlinear and totally work, but it requires A LOT of stages of this to get 360 degrees of shift (enough for all the colors a TV can display). Also, (in addition to not being super cheap) the really good varactors are small SMT devices. I personally don’t care, but some of the cave-people with soldering irons who frequent this site occasionally express concern about this sort of thing and their poor tired eyeballs etc etc. Generally when this happens I turn up the Brandenburg Concertos and have my manservant pour me another Campari spritzer, but this time I decided the unwashed masses should have some cake too.

So.

It took a lot of searching and fiddling to find something that I thought would work, that was both elegant and cheap and didn’t require exotic components or a sensitive board layout or weird supply rails or whatever. I had this suspicion that a PLL could do what I wanted, cause you know, its job is to party with phase. PLLs regularly work at or above colorburst frequencies (3.58MHz) which is also good because it means they aren’t on the edge of some spec.

The other idea I had (a voltage controlled all-pass filter) was generally too hard to do at frequency ranges that high (the LM13700 won’t slew anywhere near that fast, for instance). Other than designing an OTA which works at those frequencies (on my list of things to do, along with dating supermodels, designing invincible armor and generally running Stark Enterprises) I wasn’t sure how to implement this in a simple way.

PLLs are not the easiest circuits to understand (for me, anyway). But they are cheap and ubiquitous and many very smart people have written a lot about them. Eventually I stumbled across this circuit in EDN. The description with it is brief, but pithy, and explains the essential details of what I wanted to do.

Armed with this I was able to create a new design, standing on the shoulders of great nerds past. And when UPS shows up, I’ll know how well it (as well as the Mess Tool) works out!

Xoxo, TB

The pretty pretty gerbers for a new video tool. This device will hopefully allow you to take all the precious bits of composite NTSC (or PAL, I guess) video and keep them safe, while mucking with the rest of the signal. Sync, blanking, and colorburst are separated with a level comparator, and a mux allows you to inject new signals or perturb the old one. It’s analog, and based on the AD828 op amp, the AD8561 comparator, and the LT1203 video mux/buffer. For one, I hope it works. For two, I hope it looks awesome. Stay posted!

It was with great pleasure that I posted the initial list of hardware features that will make it into the next hardware revision of WTPA on the Narrat1ve forum. Until you start seeing boards rolling out, there’s still time to change this stuff, so feel free to let me know what you think and what you’d like to see.

Here they are, as well as what they do for the kit and what they’ll do to the price:
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1.) WTPA 2 will have 8 controller buttons and not six (the very first one had 5 I think). This will allow us to avoid the dreaded 3-button combo when accessing functions. However, this means two more buttons, and one more shift register IC and socket. This costs more.

2.) There will be a through hole RAM chip. This means the whole kit will be through hole (no smt). This will probably cost about the same, but the board will need to get a little bigger.

3.) The analog sample clock will be based on a 4046 and not an op-amp relaxation oscillator. I can do this because I don’t need the extra op-amp section for overdubbing. This will cost a little less and will also allow CV input to the clock.

4.) The control pot will be replaced with an endless rotary encoder. This will help in all kinds of subtle ways. This may cost a hair more. Given enough pins, I may add a second encoder.

5.) The MCU will be either an Atmega644p or 324p, simply because I want the freedom to add new functions and we’re pretty much out of flash memory on the 164. This will also give us more RAM which may help some of the granularizing functions, and may be able to help with ISR speed if I’m smart about buffering. Those chips are still a 40-pin dip. They cost more.

6.) Some of the values in the analog section will change, which will result in slightly more headroom. This will probably cost about the same.

7.) The bus which is just hanging out doing nothing on the v1 WTPA will be used to access permanent memory. There will be an optional daughterboard which will contain a flash memory chip and will be able to store either 8, 16, or 32 samples depending on how some pricing and availability works out for me. I _might_ implement a sample loader via MIDI. Maybe. The daughterboard will come assembled (all that stuff is small smt biz) and will cost more than $20. Not sure how much more. So permanent storage will be optional.

8.) Instead of a hardware goodie bag, there will be another optional board which will have PCB mounted jacks for MIDI, Audio, and DC. Second to the RAM chip, most build problems in V1 were in the wiring. This should eliminate that problem. This board will mount under the main board. This will _probably_ be more expensive than the goodie bag, but may not be depending on some of the jack pricing.

9.) The routing from the input amp to the AVR will change A LOT. This should lower the noise floor a little.

10.) Because of all these changes, the board will be bigger. Probably not a lot bigger, though. My guess is the price will go up a little too.

OK. I finished shoe-horning necessary functions into this beast. Somebody tell me something that needs to change or this beta becomes legit by tomorrow.
There are a whopping 12 bytes left in memory, and the OS has had a lot of fat trimmed.

Here’s beta 4 (final):
http://www.narrat1ve.com/WTPA_Firmware_0x03.tar.gz

And here’s the R3 changelog, so if you don’t know, now you know:

Firmware Version 0x03:
==============================================================================
Wed Sep 2 09:37:49 CDT 2009

Done:
— Hardcoded explicit bank start address variables into define statements. They are constants in our current system; this will prevent them from being overwritten, save us some RAM and some cycles.
— Sample Start / Window / Endpoint editing, realtime adjustment. Samples with will reverse when the start point is put after the endpoint.
— Separated the “bail” command for FX and loop adjustments in MIDI
— Re-number MIDI CCs
— Added MIDI option to edit samples with wide range or tighter resolution (editing pot is an 8-bit value, MIDI is 7)
— Added “edit mode” which sucks. But allows you to stop holding down three buttons while you edit a sample.
— Removed some un- or underused softclock (timer) and Uart functions — we’re running low on flash memory.
— Divided AudioHandler routines into bank-specific routines for ISR speed BUT
–> this means we are way over memory. So, got rid of intro sequence, debug mode, all sawtooth stuff, removed some timer functions, changed MIDI handling (don’t recognize bytes we don’t use anyway), changed LED blink functions (all blink times the same)
–> Also kilt the random number init code. Changed pinning in multiply-output mode.

xo
TB

So my housemate has this really fancypants french press which is all like “she think she cute” but actually ends up making the siltiest coffee ever. You’d think that with all the video business going on I would let it slide but I ended up ordering a bunch of stainless steel cloth and some silicone washers from McMaster and going to town on that piece.

I made an additional filter with a piece of 200 x 200 mesh which according to McMaster is more than good enough to keep flour-sized particles out, and stood it off on said washer (compressed to keep particles from coming up around the shaft). The french press got a better but damned if there still wasn’t silt. I decided to worry about my job again.