Posts Tagged ‘Rocker Dudes’

Teutonic WTPA ist ein Berliner!

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Not content to rest on his laurels, Nick decided to build ANOTHER WTPA for his old friend Jonny who plays minimal techno on a fancy euro label as a present for bringing him over to Berlin to write some tracks. Again I had a chance to warm up the CAD deck and make this guy. He still has threaded holes, but everything is a little tighter than before. And he’s blue.






These cases were cut by my man Joe at Prototope who do a kickass job of laser cutting really fast, and are based in Manhattan.

By this time I got pretty convinced that churning out lasered cases was like falling off a log and figured the next WTPA ought to come with one as an option, albeit without the annoying thread cutting step.

xo
TB

WTPA — For the Ladies

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Right around this time in the summer of ’09 my buddy Nick (who stuffs the WTPA kits, and who plays in a kickass band called Lazercrystal built a WTPA for his girl Lulu, Chicago bartender par exellence and all around lovely lady. I had been on an enclosure kick and decided that this was the time to get jiggy with QCAD for linux and actually make a reproducible laser cut enclosure. I still had to tap threaded holes in the edge panels, but everything fit the first time, believe it or not.








These are the results of that experiment and Lulu’s is still about the prettiest WTPA there is out there.
The buttons are a plunger extension made of acorn nuts, flathead screws, and spacers. They look good and work well but personally I find they feel a little hinkey.

xo
TB

Ice Cream Paint Job Embedded Systems Shiz

Friday, July 31st, 2009

The following pics were a special sampler I made by hand for my buddy Dan Friel’s wedding. It was a one off gift for he and his wife Sarah.

It took a lot of screwing around, scoring, breaking, special acrylic bits, taps, and a lot of McMaster orders. No laser cutter got anywhere near this. I did manage to give myself a real nice rash from all the acrylic dust from the sander, but in the end this is the first REAL enclosure I made for WTPA and is the way of the future.




Named after Sir Gawain’s buddy, natch.
xo
TB

WTPA Shipping, Video Synth Prototype Shown Off.

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

So WTPA is no Wii Fit Circa Christmas 2008 or anything, but it’s been nice to see the orders come in. I have been admittedly slow and horrible about moving them out the door, but am getting better.

Above you can see part of the reason at least — a WTPA based video synthesizer I made for a sloppy rocker dude video art party in Brooklyn last weekend. The party was fun, the synth was cool, and most importantly I’m excited to get started on the next one.

In line with my new-found forefather vs cherry tree honesty style I will say a couple things: I have decided I must do this sort of thing mostly to prove stuff to myself about electronics nerdery. Like, I get a kick out of challenging myself to build some esoteric fruitcakery like this in all of four days, or must because lord knows I don’t make money on it, and not very many people see it, and those people that do mostly don’t get it.

So that leaves ego and da love of da game as motivations. And learning, but I think that is tied up pretty tightly with the first two.

Something else I will say: I set myself on fire making that thing –>

For reals. It was a first. It sucked. Word to the wise: acrylic takes a lot more heat to bend than ABS. And apparently a lot more heat in general than a hoodie.

Also, for those of you who do like to mess with plastics, if you haven’t gotten a set of the fancypants acrylic drillbits with the special rake and pointy ends, they will change your life. You might cry. I almost did, but stopped when I realized I was in need of extiguishing.

Finally, for those of you who wrote me looking for videos of WTPA, they’re in the “Lejendary Adventures-esque jaunt through time and space in no particularly succinct fashion” section above along with all the other longwinded esoterica about this project. [Ed Note: Nope, they’re here in this blog now.]

Oh, and in case you’re in the hood and curious I’m talking about sampling theory and how to design cool stuff in general in LA this Sunday at the fine and noble Machine Project. It should be fun (and free) and I’ll have kits for sale.

WTPA v0.95 Boards Arrive

Friday, October 17th, 2008

There is some spiritual sense of wholeness, some cosmic teleology that makes me feel thoughtful about posting pictures of a circuit called “Where’s The Party At” when it’s Friday night.

Like if somehow all the drunk, attractive people on Milwaukee Avenue could see the current in these traces they wouldn’t go to a 4am bar, because they would already have been there. Or something. I can’t decide whether this parable is supposed to be more like the two young fish meeting the old fish in the river, or the young bull and the old bull seeing all the cows from the top of the mountain. Some kind of middling-stinky animals appreciating time-and-reality type business is what I suppose I’m going for here.

*Ahem* So:

The next revision of PCBs are in! You’re looking at the Version 0.95 WTPA “barebones” boards. One thing I really like about Advanced Circuits is those sharp (and handy) fluorescent notepads they give you when you order a board. It tickles my hope for nerd-success: I used to really have to hoard them — not so long ago it took Very Serious Consideration before ripping off one of those bright, rare leaves to write “Call Mom” or something. Now I can pretty much paper my walls with them. Feels good. Before you know it I’ll have a cummerbund!

I can already see it’s going to be one of those nights, so down to business: These boards are necessary because they’re the last rev before I order the hundreds of PCBs and many thou of parts I’ll need for the real production release. Hopefully these guys are pretty close to perfect. Parts are already on their way from Digikey and Mouser and should be here next week. I’ve got an OS to re-write in the meantime — I’ve been learning a lot about the GNU Linker for some other projects and as a result my MCU code is getting a lot more pretty looking, and a little more clear (to me anyway) w/r/t how GCC’s optimizer thinks about it. Practically speaking I doubt I’ll have the OS re-written in the next couple weeks: I’ve been nuts making a Playstation version of Beat The Champ (also #8 here) which needs to be done in short order and, and just got a fancy interior design related project which of course ought to be done like yesterday, too. Of course the X-Prize Lunar Lander Challenge is next weekend and I plan to get good and drunk and watch my friends at TrueZer0 put a whoopin’ on the guy that wrote Doom.
Finally, my crappy electronic music project is playing (using WTPA even) next Friday at the Hideout with my old buddies in Parts and Labor.