Nerdy Texts of Analog and Embedded Systems Wizardry

OK, so here’s a thoroughly goofy video I made of the sampler at work — it’s for an new version of a book by Nic Collins on Hardware Hacking!
But I figured the right thing to do was to share it with you, my people. The 2 people who come to this website. That I don’t date.
It’s big — 93MB. I’m accepting applications for video editors. Here she is. [Wed Oct 8 19:20:03 CDT 2008 — I’ve changed this to the smaller file that RKH sent me. Thanks!]

Arguably more importantly, I’ve been laying out the version 1.0 boards and they’re going to be a million times better. Better analog section, 16 times the RAM, lower noise floor, harder better faster stronger etc etc.
The four brave beta testers from the springtime got their kits built and gave me an earful and the new kits have taken out a bunch of useless crap and added a bunch of (hopefully) kickass features. Time will tell…

OK, OK — So the real versions aren’t done yet, but I just coded all the MIDI functions into WTPA and when I turned it on I wet myself a little. It was that cool. You can make it do tons of stuff you’d never be able to do just by wanking on the buttons and knobs: You can totally sequence it, you can totally play it from a MIDI keyboard, you can pitch bend everything around zero, you can apply all the effects by hitting drum pads — what Yamaha said in 1982 is absolutely true — MIDI is the way of the future!

AND — and I quit my job a couple weeks ago so I could work on stuff like this.
And I have, see? So buy my stuff; keep me from going broke. When I get it together enough to release it, that is :-)

WTF? Why isn’t Todd done the new boards yet?!? Oh, that’s right, he’s burnt out from a month of all nighters and is hanging out reading Conan novels and eating bon-bons.
Not only did I kick out some nasty robot combine harvesters with my buddy Rob, but I shook down WTPA for the first time recording some crusty hott lixx on the upcoming Parts and Labor album in Milwaukee last weekend. We’ll see how that hot mess turns out.

I’m still expecting the Rev 1 samplers to be out in EARLY JUNE. Available here and probably elsewhere…

Heavens!
Back in Chicago, rode hard, put up wet. Bent 2008 (which ruled) and a certain amount of hanging with hipster rocker dudes (get up late, sweaty) resulted in some pretty killer new patches for my lil’ blood.

In the meantime, big propers to the four brave souls who bought up the 0.9 kits! Below, for their benefit, is a really big and slow to load (and unapologetically un-artsy) photo of my kit which shows off where all the components go because my silkscreen layers in the PCB files are still a little crunked up. It’s late, and I just built new linkages for a small robot combine harvester. Really.

Brooklyn, 10 hours of sleep later. Debugging on an old friend’s coffee table. Brooklyn is good for a lot of things. You can get any number of tasty and erudite coffee drinks really easily, and the girls are cute (I think — they dress cool enough that I think you sometimes think they are even when they actually aren’t).

Say, however, you coded a resampling routine and realized your gain staging in the analog section was all types of foobar, and you really needed:

a.) a carbon-film resistor kit
b.) your Tek
c.) even a soldering iron.

What would you do?
I’ll tell you what. You’d fix it in software and probably go to a party or eat a falafel, and maybe worry that you weren’t dressed well enough.

Kits for tomorrow. Extra op-amps! Value Added!