Modular units are all about versatility and multi-functionality, with many users after a device which is flexible and can be applied to numerous sonic scenarios. Blinkenlights have released their Vactrol Drum for Eurorack which delivers a huge range of real and unreal drum and percussive sounds for your modular noodles requiring low end thunder and high frequency sizzles!
The Vactrol Drum employs a white noise generator (similar to the Roland TR-808) through a vactrol filter and VCA to generate kick drums, rimshots and hihats, as well as alien bleeps, squeeks and crashes. Controls include amplitude, resonance, attack, decay, bias and pitch envelope with gate and trigger inputs – to sculpt the sound depending on what you need. The unit has voltage controlled pitch, and can work as a noisy oscillator which the resonance turned up!
It comes as a PCB and panel with an extensive build guide (PDF), with BOM, schematics and test instructions to ensure it’s all good – the PCB silkscreen shows the names and values of all the components which makes construction that much easier! The finished unit is 4HP wide, 3U High and 100mm deep, and available now from the Blinkenlights Tindie Store!
If there’s one thing we’ve all lost at one time or another, it’s the remote. As a kid, I remember my parents always asking where the TV remote got off too, and it was often in obscure places. To this day, I still find myself wandering the living room at night hunting down that illusive piece of hardware.
One thing I’ve never lost track of, however, is my smartphone. For many of us, these devices might as well be attached to our hands. If you find yourself without a remote for your smart TV, or you want to use your computer away from the desk, MyTeletouch offers an interesting solution.
This simple USB dongle plugs into your computer or smart TV and then pairs it to your smartphone via Bluetooth. All you need beyond the hardware is a free app which is available on Android, iOS, and Windows app stores.
Once you’ve made the connection, you can switch seamlessly between mouse, keyboard, and joystick functionality right on your phone. While there are still some kinks to work out in the software side of things, the video below shows that it’s working pretty well!
With the PlayStation 4 as the main focus of console gamers, the PS3 and its DualShock 3 controllers haven’t had a lot of love in recent years. If you have any sitting around collecting dust (guilty!), the Axisdapter can give them a new lease on life.
This PCB connects to the flat ribbon connector on the main PCB of the PS3 controller, something only the OEM models have (so no third-party ones). Once installed, the buttons on the stock controller are replaced by the terminal blocks on this PCB. However, the stock controller retains the gyroscope and thumb sticks, which opens up the possibility to make flight stick builds or other types of custom controllers.
Freneticamnesic created this board and used it to help them turn a DualShock 3 into a virtual pinball machine controller, but the possibilities go far beyond that. You’ll need to sacrifice a DS3 for this project, but it’s for a good cause!
Jason Hotchkiss has been a Tindie seller for longer than most, with a diverse range of best-selling products for music making under his Sixty Four Pixels moniker. His devices have proven to be hugely popular and influential in the music tech world, with rave reviews flooding in and a customer list which reads like a who’s who of music! We thought it would be a nice idea to sit down with him to find out how it all began, what motivates his passion for gadgets and how he approaches their design.
Beginnings
Jason was a child of the 70s, where anything electronic tended to be well outside of a child’s pocket money budget. He would fantasize about owning a Nintendo Game & Watch or CGL Galaxy Invaders game with the colored VFD screen. At the time he didn’t ever consider it was something he might one day understand the workings of or be able to replicate.
As a child he enjoyed messing about with batteries, light bulbs, switches and wire, making a hobby of electrics rather than electronics. He says: “I was terrible for taking apart any toy or gadget with electrical bits in and using the parts to make other things, which I’d then usually take into school and get them confiscated by a teacher. A few electric shock makers and a motorized ballpoint pen scribbling machine went that way”.
Aside from electronics, he messed with sound too. His stepdad had a reel-to-reel tape recorder which he used to make a delay loop with, experimenting with feedback and pitch shifting. He also had an old calculator with an LED display that would interfere with AM radio signals and produce whistly tones depending on what key you pressed, which was, technically his first synth!
Jason didn’t get into serious electronic circuits until pretty recently (when he was almost 40 years old) crediting the late, great, Ray Wilson and his Weird Sound Generator (WSG) project for the start of that – “I was doing a lot of music collaboration projects online and someone had made one and it got me hooked. From there, it was on to Arduino and MIDI then there was no going back!”
Programming
Jason got his first computer at the age of 13 – a Sinclair ZX-81, followed soon after by a ZX Spectrum which he tried to program from the moment he switched it on, as he couldn’t afford to buy any games. In a time before tape-to-tape copies of games started doing the rounds at school, Jason was writing his own to play! Just about everyone with a home computer was trying to make their own games – it was a golden age where a schoolkid could realistically write a hit game on their own, in their bedroom.
“I spent most of my early teens shut away in my room with the Spectrum plugged into some massive old black and white TV set of dubious electrical safety, working on some DIY game till the early hours”. It turned out to be time well spent as Jason became a professional coder in his later life.
Installations
As a member of the local Hackspace in Brighton Jason would encounter local artists coming along for help on electronic projects for interactive art projects. He helped one artist out with a ‘Noisy Table’ installation using contact microphones, time measurement, and maths to work out where a ball hit a table tennis table surface. The result was then used to trigger and modulate sounds via MIDI!
From his involvement in the Hackspace, he was asked if he wanted to be involved in an Electronic Art exhibition, where he made his ‘Hammer Pong’ game/installation, using six 5 meter addressable LED strips. The game is played by hitting big foam blocks with big soft hammers to send the ball (a pulse of light) back along the strip, in a similar way to pong mixed with the old test-of-strength fairground game.
More recently Jason displayed two pieces at Fort Process sound art festival in Newhaven, where he exhibited a playable musical instrument that used two high voltage Tesla coils to make tuned sparking sounds that could be played by visitors using a MIDI keyboard. In the adjacent room, he had an exhibit where audio signals from a set of audio oscillators were fed into the clock and data lines of a large LED matrix, creating chaotic dancing patterns and hypnotic droning sounds!
MIDI
Jason’s fascination is with sounds and controlling them; he loves the idea of generating electronic music in unexpected, random ways based on real world objects and interactions, stating that “MIDI is just the most accessible and sensible way of linking things up”. An early project of his used light sensors fixed on lava lamps to trigger and modulate sounds in synth software on a PC, with MIDI making a seemingly complicated setup relatively straightforward.
Jason loves MIDI for its simplicity and efficiency, while he enjoys having flexibility to add new features which the original designers couldn’t have anticipated. The fact it’s still the industry standard after nearly 40 years shows how great it really is.
Programming Products
Most of his Tindie products have some kind of firmware programming, which means there is a computer chip on board which runs the program that makes the device work. He’s mainly used 8-bit PIC micro-controllers since they’re reliable and come with useful on-chip peripherals. “I program these in plain old C and have got to know the hardware really well so can program them without any libraries or OS”. He’s recently started working with 32-bit ARM chips for some new projects, which he informs me are becoming a new favorite.
In terms of project satisfaction, Jason says that nothing beats a spark gap Tesla coil putting out half a million volts of 3 foot sparks! “However, the fact it sounds like the space-time continuum is being ripped apart and might quickly result in neighbors calling the police means run-times are short, but very sweet”.
Sixty Four Pixels
When Jason first started selling, it was a couple of sales via private messages from people who wanted to make versions of his YouTube projects. Someone eventually told him about Tindie and he got started here. “In the early days all the sellers used to have a Google hangout with founder Emile once a week!” so what started out as a hobby around his 9 to 5 coding job has soon become full time employment.
Going back a couple of years he was doing freelance coding 3 days a week, so utilized the days off to do his own thing – ramping things up and even starting to employ a couple of friends a day a week to aid the production process. This year, through the success of his MIDI devices, Jason has started renting a workshop space for the business. “I am still not sure how long I can go on before I need to get back to some proper work, but I hope never!”
Prototype to Product
For Jason, the most important thing is that the idea is exciting and is something that he would use himself. From there he thinks about the functionality he’d like, and the flow of using the device. He admits to spending a lot of time pressing imaginary buttons on paper sketches of control panels and thinking through how the device might respond! He thinks it’s important to realize some parts of the user-functionality will determine key points in the hardware design – for example what inputs and outputs are needed, how many components and how the user will interact with it, so it’s important to do so before getting an initial PCB design made up.
“Once I have an initial PCB prototype working I often spend months playing with ideas in the firmware coding. I like to try things out in a jam session environment and in some cases I’ve decided I don’t actually like a new idea and end up putting it on the back burner”.
He used to design PCBs and home etch the prototypes but nowadays he finds it cheap and quick to get factory made PCBs, so he goes straight to that while having a few projects in the pipeline at the same time so he can work on something else while waiting for PCBs to come back.
Jason will give a couple of friends prototype models to try out for their feedback. He also finds writing a user guide is a good way to verbalize ideas and see what makes sense – helping to streamline certain parts of the user work flow within the code, before it’s on sale.
Recommended Reading
Jason recommends starting with an Arduino board and reading the Arduino forums, Hackaday projects and places like Instructables for some basic LED projects to get started. Once you have the basics, a custom MIDI controller is a good first music based Arduino project.
After that, he recommends looking at the Teensy board from PJRC and the fantastic Teensy Audio Library which allows you to create your own digital synthesizers, samplers and audio effects – with seemingly immediate results. Alternatively, if you want to try the analog route, Jason recommends soldering synths and effects from DIY kits, and experimenting with your own circuits: “This stuff is still mostly black magic to me!”
Jason’s products reside in the studios of Jean Michele Jarre, Pete Townsend, Vince Clarke, Little The Freemasons, NZCA Lines and many more, which he puts down to the time he takes trying to pack features into his products. He likes to ‘feature creep’ as much as he can into one unit, with as many useful functions as he can think of. “Sometimes among the most unlikely set of features, a wonderfully novel gem of functionality emerges and I’d like to think part of the appeal is unique and useful features!”
We continue to be impressed, intrigued and astounded by Jason’s products, and like many in the music world, are anticipating his new gadgets for more melody, rhythm and fun in our studios. Keep an eye on his Tindie Store for all his goodies – thanks Jason!
Some people have a “green thumb,” a natural talent for maintaining their house plants or gardens. Other people, like myself, have a little more trouble taking care of them. While we’ve seen soil moisture trackers before, this Plant Environment Monitor takes things several steps further.
Using a combination of humidity, temperature, light, and soil nutrition sensors, this solution offers everything you’ll need to keep your plants healthy. The device was created as part of a project to produce a low-power, low-cost wireless device using the nRF52832 chip.
Not only is this chip compatible with Arduino, but it’s also fully compatible with other chips in the series, including the nRF51, 24L, and 24AP series. There is an option to include a LIR2450 battery with the purchase, or you can use your own. The ultra low-power allows 2 months per charge, with the option to charge it using any 5 volt power source.
With a device like this, plant owners like myself can finally have house plants that stick around.
Arthur C. Clarke once said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Given that statement, the Crocopoi is pure sorcery.
This tiny board uses a capacitance sensor, which allows you to use any conductive material you’d like to close the circuit. USB connectivity, and the touche sensing is delivered by the onboard ATtiny24 microcontroller. Objects with conductive material like pencils, fruit, or anything else that conducts electricity will trigger the board. Six alligator clips of different colors are included to help make these connections.
One of the great uses is to create a simple but unique inputs for games. If you’re interesting in programming your own game with touch inputs like this, I can tell you as a seasoned gamer that I’ve never controlled a game with an apple before, so there’s an idea right there.
You may someone who scrolls through the pages of Tindie thinking, “all of this looks awesome, but I don’t know where to start.” Not to worry, I was in your place once. Electronics hardware (mostly soldering) can be daunting for beginners.
Thankfully, the My First Circuit Kit solves this problem by offering an option that gets you into everything without the need for any soldering. The kit comes with several basic components: LEDs, resistors, capacitors, and so on. It also includes others that are a little more interesting, like a photo-resistor.
The overall design is a joule thief that powers some LEDs in low-light conditions. An interesting element of the design is the way a 1.5V battery manages to light up two LEDs that require 3V each. Sounds impossible, right?
The circuit itself has a voltage booster area that increases the power to 6V through an oscillation which sends voltage to the capacitor. When the capacitor is fully charged, the transistor releases all the voltage to the LEDs at once until the battery is fully discharged. This clever design lets you squeeze (or steal — which is where the name comes from) energy out of these common alkaline batteries, long after most devices would have stopped running.
The plug-and-play design ensures that anyone can dive in and bring this kit to life!
Making sci-fi noises is one reason many of us got into the sound of synths – from the theremin in ‘The Day the World Stood Still’ to the deathly warbles of Delia Derbyshire’s `Dr Who Theme`, sci-fi has inspired and applied some of the most memorable and expressive synths sounds we know. The Noise-X Kit is a great example of the accessible devices available to us to make these sounds in tabletop devices!
The Noise-X uses 4 digitally-controlled Oscillators for sound generation, with Sine, Square, Triangle, Sawtooth, Ramp, Pulse and Noise waveforms to choose from. The built-in mixer allows you to merge them together, with LFOs to control pitch and amplitude – giving you wibbled vibrato and undulating volume to your sound.
The Noise-X has been carefully thought out with some of the most useful features in synthesis – ring-modulation, FM, a flanger and delay unit are all on board for more shape-shifting possibilities than Yoshimitsu! Available from the MadLab store now, this unique FX machine marks the spot of your next sonic adventure!
Here’s a demo of what it can do:
Check out some of the sci-fi sounds this machine makes:
While still, and perhaps forever, something of a niche item, ePaper displays are an intriguing concept. Generally black-and-white, or perhaps also red if you’re lucky, they’re great for reading, and only use power when updating what is shown. A very slow refresh rate makes this type of display a poor choice for dynamic content, but they’re very useful with e-book readers and sometimes smartwatches.
If you’d like an easy way to use one of these devices as a sort of e-Post-it note, look no further than the Papyr Nordic nRF52840 display from Electronut Labs. This device comes ready to connect to Android smartphones via BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), and allows you to send images or handwritten notes to its screen. It the device can also receive data via MQTT if you so prefer.
One notable stat on the listing is that when advertising and not connected, the device draws a mere 22 micro amps of current. This means that the device should theoretically run for several years between battery changes, making it a great passive information display. Alternatively, the device can be programmed to your liking, and a dev kit is available with debugging and programming accessories, a battery, and laser-cut enclosure if you want to go further.
When you look back on retro gaming handhelds, the Game Boy is probably the first one that comes to mind. While it’s indeed a classic, it’s not without flaws. In the case of the Super Game Boy, the clock speed is about 4% faster than the original, which affects not only the audio playback, but also disqualifies it in speed-running.
To further compound the issue, it’s also the reason why this release didn’t include a link port for multiplayer. The difference in speed would have caused the devices to desync. While Japan received a Super Game Boy 2 that fixed the problem using a crystal oscillator at the proper speed, the U.S. version never received a fix.
It is possible to install a crystal oscillator of your own, and this GameBoy Clock Mod solves the problem without breaking other interesting features of the system, like the ability to change the gameplay speed using the Commander controller from Hori.
The mod avoids common issues by applying the correct clock onto the I/O chip, which is how the second iteration in Japan fixed the problem. You won’t need to lift any pins to install it either, plus the solder points are simple to attach to the board.
If you decide to install this fix, this seller also offers a mod to add that sweet, sweet link port to the Super Game Boy as well, but keep in mind you need the clock mod for it to work properly.
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more.
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Learn More.
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
