Nerdy Texts of Analog and Embedded Systems Wizardry

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

Sometime right around this date I made the following crappy video to show off some of WTPA’s less-exciting features and also to figure out how to use all these newfangled “digital cameras” and whatnot. Though it was a resounding flop, it features Pavement remixes, a peep covered in Urethane, and a very bad buzz.

This doesn’t show off any MIDI, on-the-fly editing, multi-timbral sampling, or not sucking in general but is included for posterity.
xo
TB

June 3, 2010 — Brooklyn NY:

Around this date is where the old, hardcoded HTML site I made ended. It had gotten to the point where I was mostly gibbering to the dorks in the forum about WTPA — most everything I put on the internet was there in the form of a bunch of weird links referenced to that stuff. Accordingly, I’ve gone along and tried to make all that stuff into “proper” blog entries retroactively. Most of them will center on pretty pics I made of dorky projects between disrepair and harmony. The Purgatorio section of the Interweb.

There will be some questionable tenses and deeply gerrymandered blog posts after this until Spring of 2010, but hey, nobody ever said history wasn’t revisionist.

xoxox
TB

Happy Birthday America!

Wait — no: Happy Birtday WTPA!

It’s a little bogus to use the above fuzzy-wuzzy pictures, but given the current state of fireworks in my neighborhood and the celebratory announcement of the NEW FIRMWARE, I feel justified in using hazy party pics. The above was actually a totally kickass surprise party (peep the cake made by my girl Julianna Luther) in May to celebrate the WTPA launch here in Chicago; why my friends decided to start beef between me and Dre I’ll never know.

So anyway, we’ll pretend it’s a birthday party for the NEW FIRMWARE! As of today the version 2 firmware is now the most current, and will ship with all WTPAs ordered.

Changes From Rev1 To Rev2 Firmware:

• The original firmware did not take into account settling time for the ADC when changing channels, and as a result, the last result from the control pot often ended up being logged as the first (or first several) samples. This resulted in a loud click at the beginning of a sampled phrase when the control pot was set to certain positions. The sampling routine now throws out the first few samples until the ADC has settled, eliminating the click.
• The firmware now allows for playing a “single shot” sample when the sample is backwards masked.
• The firmware now sets the DAC to midscale at powerup. This eliminates the loud bump that would happen the first time a user triggered any audio interrupt (including recording) after powerup.

The current firmware is now posted on the site (the old version of the source code is also included in the firmware download, and you’re welcome to compile and use that if you want to be retro for some weird reason). Those of you who already have WTPAs can update to the new firmware using any old avr programmer with a 6-pin ISP connector. I like the Atmel STK500, but I’d be remiss in not mentioning the fine programmers available for cheap at Adafruit Industries who pretty much have this whole kit game on lock.

Information on how to update your firmware is available in lots of AVR-specific places on the net:

• The GNU Tool Chain for AVR — Very nerdy and complete and useful. It’s where I go.
• Winavr — A Windows port of that toolchain.
• AVRfreaks — The biggest and most complete AVR user community.
• AVR Studio — Atmel’s IDE. I can’t stand this but you might like it.
• WTPA User Forum — If and when there are WTPA specific questions about this, the answers will be here.

In other news, Narrat1ve has not one but THREE new products in the pipe. One smaller than WTPA, one bigger, and one A LOT bigger. And no, one of them is not a “real website”. I’m excited. Stay tuned.

Xoxoxo,

TMB