TheAncientOne

A few starter addresses: DIL sockets from Rapid Maplin do a reasonable fibreglass square pad board: This is the type of tool you want - follow the links for info on wire etc. New modified wrap tool at RS PCB Pins at RS PCB Pins Some of these prices are a bit of a joke - shoppoiing around will help, though because these are now seen as high end prototyping systems, costs are high - especially when you look at PLCC sockets. I do have a lot of new old stock, rather chunky blue 16 pin sockets, and I'll sell you some of these far cheaper than new if you just want to try out. Scan ebay for the tools - you want 30AWG, preferably 'modified wrap' and the 30AWG 'Kynar' or 'Tefzel' wire. A word of warning on the power tools: if you find a 'strip and wrap' bit, they do NOT work on normal 'Kynar' wire. I think I have a spare 'gun', but it's 110 volt for safety - you need a transformer. PM me for an email if you want to talk more about the technique. <Edit> Just checked ebay for you. lots of power tools in the USA, but run for this one now! OK hand wrap tool Hope this helps

I could use a batch of these, but for some reason they don't ship to europe. Any US MIDIboxers able to help out? I can Paypal you money, or send you goods from Europe as suits. Thanks

Velleman have a US division, and a dealer locator. They list a 4 channel triac driver, and a 4 as well as an 8 channel relay board. The 8 way relay board had a wireless remote option: hack the controller using some opto's from the MIDI and you've got a remote light controller. SSR's are better for lighting; they use zero-voltage switching and thus don't produce mains interference that gets into your sound system Velleman US site Hope this helps Mike

Perhaps not a good idea to use Red LED's if you are doing that - the neighbours might start getting the wrong kind of visitors!

Sasha's display reads right either way up, and reminds me of an old English joke about a boating lake, (they had them in parks: you could hire a rowing boat). Man with loudhailer shouts out "Come in number 99 your time is up!" An assistant says to the man with the loudhailer ' But we've only got 72 boats' Man with the loudhailer shouts "Number 66 are you in trouble?"

This guy on ebay has bags of 20 for £2.00 plus carriage. If you buy more than one he doesn't carge extra. I've had some and they are good quality. They are a radial type, easier to fit on the SID board. http://stores.ebay.co.uk/yello61292 Hope this helps Mike

The latest version of hypnocube has that, I think what they are trying to protect is the amount of work that went into the colour driving. Personally I would like it to be fully open, but I can also see just how much work went into the code. They do sell bare board if you want to code from scratch

I think these guys did it first. They have kits, and the new model has uSB input. sadly not open source though. By the way - I did the pricing, the kits are not a bad deal. http://hypnocube.com/

I haven't got a picture, but in 1979 I build a time display for an athletics meeting for a local club. Each segment used 7 3 foot fluorescent tubes, giving 6 foot high letters, (it may have been 7x2 giving 4 foot - I can't remember). The tubes had transformer pre-heated end filaments, and triac control of the ballasts. To save money is was fed by a 20mA serial loop. opto isolated, and all the drive electronics were live. In those days an SSR (even a small one) was over £10, and we would have needed 28 of them. The drive was simply an SN7447 driving triacs through transistor buffers. To avoid mains clicks, the data was latched into 4x SN7475's on mains zero, to avoid the cost of zero volt switching of each triac. We had to put a wirewound resistor in parallel with each tube to avoid low current drop out. The cases were scrap aluminium panels from a local company that refurbished trucks. An electrical wholesaler who sponsored the club donated the tubes, ballasts and transformers, in return for their name on the front. We couldn't afford opalescent perspex, so used a 'mask' made of alloy, and baking parchment over the tube holes, then clear plastic on top. I still occasionally worry that it is in storage somewhere, and that some idiot will try firing it up again. That's a very cool display doc, though I think Sasha now has to make an MTC with a pair of his. It might motivate me to get my MTC and MIDImon done. Nice work!

This relay board is not bad, and the 'dry' contacts can be used for things like operating projectors. Velleman Relay board from Rapid

Ideas: 1) build a MIDI -> DMX interface. Buy commercial DMX dimmer/relay packs. Chauvet do them, they are cheap, (though Chauvet are a bit like the Behringer of the lighting world). Nearly all commercial light controllers are DMX. 2) Following on from the above, Buy a USB DMX interface, and drive it through a PC/Laptop with a custom MIDI controller. 3) There are a lot of MIDI light controller designs out there on the web, but all require you to learn good safe mains control procedures. 4) see if there is a good industrial panel builder in your locality. get them to build your mains control box and certify it. You can provide a tested MIDI controller, (all it has to be able to do is turn on LED's), in a module case, that they can wire in. This is a standard way of working. If you are in the UK, I might be able to help, though due to public liability issues, I'm not doing that on line. That being said, with care, a simple SSR box is not hard. The pictures attached show an old one of mine. It needs an update in that I used a 5 pin DIN connector as input, the switch letting me select 1 of 4 channels of plain hard wired drive, (all my old lightshow gear used DIN's to keep the cost down), note the recycled heat sink! In those days I had no MIDI, and used the 270o DIN for power, and the 180o for control. I'm going to change to another plug to avoid confusion, though plugging a MIDI plug into the socket on here would be completely safe, only 1 pin at a time is connected. +5V with respect to ground (Pin 3), turned the SSR on. I did other boxes with 4 SSR's, though I think they found a final resting place in a club in Manchester when I stopped doing that sort of mobile stuff, years ago. A design using modern mains out connectors would not be hard, though the hardware cost would not be that cheap.

I think the later ones are Sifam collet knobs: http://www.sifam.com/controls_home.lasso

I was kidding a bit there. You are right, some wire wrap boards just need some Bolognese sauce. The Shepard generator I'm doing here just does an octave of fixed 'paradoxical' tones. You've started me thinking about a voltage controlled one. Would have to be a driven microprocessor design to avoid a lot of complexity, but could be done. Perhaps it could be possible to phase lock a local clock oscillator to an incoming VCO signal, and drive the tone gen from that. Nice idea. Thanks.

Don't knock it until you try it. Second hand tools can be had on ebay, and it can be done very simply. I'm still using it - here is a paradoxical sound generator card design which I found on line, (took a lot of searching to find the EPROM image), which is ideally suited to the technique. It's more useful for digital, not so much if you have a lot of discrete components. For those wondering, it's a hardware device to do Shepard Tones. If it works reasonably, I'll do a redesign avoiding the nearly impossible to get ZN426 D->A, and repost it.

Note: in the schematic, the LED labels are transposed.

Tilted has got it right: from the input side, most SSR's look like a LED. Most modern ones have current limiting - these typically will say "3 to 32V" on the label, so they will work with both logic systems and PLC's, (industrial Programmable Logic Controllers tend to have 24 Volt outputs). Most draw about 5 to 10 mA. A minor warning about some of the cheaper ones - they have a minimum load requirement - if the AC power load is less than (say) 10mA, half cycling and flickering will occur. Half cycling is due the the triac in the SSR having different sensitivities in the different 'cycle quadrants', and so latching on as it should in the positive half cycles, but dropping out in the negative ones. It's worth checking the spec' to make sure that they match your requirements properly.

I don't think that will be a possibility until we are using cheap ARM boards. CSound compiles on a PC, so presumably turns into Intel machine code, or some intermediate run time code that runs on a PC. This si vastly more complex that PIC or AVR. There are variants of CSound for PowerPC and some other workstations, like Sun and MIPS. It might be possible to make a stand alone instrument that way, but the I/O and control would eat a lot of cycles. Did you ever see the late lamented Chameleon? Chameleon Website That is the sort of engine that woudl be needed - and that had a 24 bit DSP for the audio, with a Motorola 'Coldfire' - an embedded version of the 68000, for control. A bit out of the PIC range. A few thoughts anyway. Perhaps an older PC in a desktop style case might be rackmounted and recycled as a CSound engine.

There is really only one sensible answer to this: ARM. There are a great many variants and sources. There are good free toolchains, it's 32 bit and fast as well as scaleable. There have been over 10 Billion made, so it's not likely to go away for a long time. There are FPGA's with embedded ARM's and all manner of flash sizes available. There is even a cute dev kit for an ST variant here: ST ARM DevKit You can get an embedded Linux for ARM, as well as several other real time cores.

If you got lucky, Analog Devices would give you PCI card called a 'Sphinx' card with 1 SHARC on board, which would run extended CSound in real time. Less lucky you had to buy it. Creamware got in on the act, though I never knew anyone that ran one. I think John Ffitch at Bath University did some work on this too. My friend Derek Pierce used straight PC's for most of his CSound work with Beat System. CSound is pretty hardcore, though there is nothing in synthesis that can't be done, (eventually), with it. 200MHz? Luxury! I can remember doing phase vocoding with CDP on Atari ST's. You had to set it up and let it run overnight. On memorable morning I got up to find Nibbins, our cat, fast asleep on top of the, (now overheated and crashed), Atari, and all the work lost. Cat came close to losing one of her nine lives that morning. I still use it as a toolkit, though I've not done any music work for ages. Recently friends wanted some CD's of Pink Noise. A snip in CSound, and classic pure 3dB/Octave Pink Noise too. If you dig into the stuff that Gabriel Maldonado and Michael Gogins are doing, there is a VST version and other realtime oriented stuff. Warning:- steep learning curve ahead! The CSound book is pretty essential. Some of the windows front ends are broken in the latest releases, you might be better sticking to an editor in classic style.

The look makes me think of the pushme-pullyou from Doctor Doolittle. The slip recovery is very organic.I wonder what the battery life is?

Kartoshka has invoked the spelling corrector gremlin: kayboard i guess is keybaord, and I guess is Keyboard. (something like rule 96 - every bug you fix introduces at least one more). I, for one, like the rear labels where they are. I don't like having to dig around the back on something to find a connector, and since I move stuff around a lot, I think it would be useful. I've not looked at the Greyhill switch properly, in terms of spindle/knob matching, I think it might look better to have the mode switch labels as two symmetrical columns of 8, one each side, but as I said, I think this might give rise to a pointer alignment problem, (I'm certain Sasha has already looked at this). If it were possible, then the word 'Mode' could then be centred under the switch. Personally, I think the 'mode' label is redundant - the switch markings are self explanatory. Just a few thoughts anyway.

LOL! I'm just recycling the bags from ELFA - I bought parts for my AVRx from them. You're right about the shipping though.

Almost ready to go. Parts sorted, bagged and tagged. All I need now are posting bags and to get the airmail prices. I'll memo out to get your PayPal addresses. I got the core cost down to 21 Euro, (including the 2 AN6562's which I added later), this will be plus packing, postage and PayPal fee, which I have yet to work out. Meanwhile, this is what it all looks like:

Parts checked in - all there. Transistors are Sanyos. I did get the AN6562's as well. I have run the 2SA733P's through my Peak DCA55. http://www.peakelec.co.uk/acatalog/jz_dca55.html. Well worth the money if you test a lot of stuff. They do one that does Resistors, Capacitors and Inductors too. Score as follows: Lowest gain measured = 250 Highest gain measured = 348 Transistors with gain greater than 300 = 65 Transistors with gain between 290 and 299 = 40 So everyone gets 3 high gain ones for their filters. THis is the best I can get - the 2SA733AP seems to be unavailable. The 2SC536F's are actually the F variant, (some suppliers list them then supply the more generic parts).

When I was working on an LEDE control room, a long time ago, we had an interesting discussion that I never got an answer to. In an LEDE, you isolate the speakers from the room fabric to prevent structure borne sound getting transmitted to the listener faster than through the air - so called 'early early sound'. Effectively smearing the bass transients and worse. In the HiFi world it seems an article of faith to spike speakers rigidly to the floor and to prevent them moving in any way, one reason given is to stop cabinet movement doppler distorting the sound from the tweeters. Are either of these ideas right? Having recently heard some, I'm seriously thinking of doing a lower power music system using some of the E J Jordan full range units, trading the bass loss, (or needing a subwoofer), for the coherence and absence of a conventional crossover. I reckon they would be magic for Ambisonics. http://www.ejjordan.co.uk/ Not sure, it could have been that you'd never have got any sane cow near the barn with the noises coming out at times...