Posts Tagged ‘WTPA v1.01’

WTPA Firmware Rev 3 Released!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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

WTPA Version 1.01 Sold Out!

Friday, November 20th, 2009

As of today, there are no more OG WTPAs!
The last 20 or so (of 200) took forever to get out the door.
Thanks, everybody, for helping make this happen. Thanks for all the feedback, and for the patience, and for giving me my first less-than-wack experience designing a product.

Hats off,
TB

(Note, there are still lots of benighted and lonely bare PCBs and microcontrollers for the H4RDC0R3)

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