AudioWeevil07 Production Run

The batch is born...
More details on the main BugBrand site

Pics from Venn 2007

There's some great pictures from this year's festival by Adam Faraday on the Venn website.
This is the end of my improvisation with Ferenc of the Hung Hangar Ensemble. An amazing pleasure to play with him.

Front Panel Engraving

After quite a time of experimentation, my cnc-engraved front panels are starting to work out really well.

The last few days I've been trying to clear some of the backlog of pcb projects picked up including:::
Fonik's SSM2044 LowPassFilter









Two Thomas Henry UD1 DrumSynths with PCBs from sMs Electronics









Thomas Henry Super Controller with PCB from Fonik
- this circuit comes from TH's Build a Better Music Synthesizer book (good book!)









PT2399 delay project - previous versions have had some niggling problems to iron out.










The technique is now relatively smooth though it still takes a while for the machining:
Front panels designed in FrontDesigner
Exported as .hpgl engraving files
Loaded into EasyCam to generate the machine files for Mach3 - set the engraving depth etc
Mach3 drives the CNC engraving. These are the first uses of custom blank panels I got made up locally (at about 1/4 of the cost of blanks from Paia!) - simple Frac sized black-anodized panels. The engraving cuts through the black surface to expose raw aluminium. The only tricky bit is to make sure you engrave deep enough, but not too deep (literally a difference of fractions of a mm)
Once engraved, the holes are drilled
..& the project is put together.

Solar Weevils - 1st Performances

SolarWeevils had their first airing at the recent Offload Festival in Bristol.

Just to recap the idea - the mini batteries are charged up during the day by the solar panels. The Weevils are silent during the day but when evening comes a light sensor kicks the sound circuit into life and the Weevils perform a dusk chorus until their power drains and they quieten for the night.

The design actually had to be changed at the last minute - tests with the SuperCapacitors from MUTR hadn't been so great, so a change was made to using miniature NiMH rechargeable batteries. These behave in a much more stable and long-lifed way and allowed the addition of LEDs driven by the 3 oscillators. Blinky, clickety, squeek-noise.

This project will be mutated sometime in the future, but there's not much sun around these parts at the moment so I reckon its hibernation time until spring.

Klee Komplete

Following on from the previous post... The Klee is up and running rings around the world.!. Still a few little tweaks to do, but the depth of power is well apparent already. Mighty respect to Scott who dreamt it up and to the other two beta testers in the project, Bill from sMs Electronics and Andy Uncle Krunkus. I've learnt a bunch from getting this together - both some deep deep electronics workings and a load of new building techniques. You only have to look at the wiring at the back to realise that its quite a major project!

If you want to try building your own Klee, PCBs and parts kits will soon be going on sale via the electro-music.com forum (though they're maybe all taken?)