First revision: Arduino Control Voltage

The recent holiday brought into my possession a shiny new Arduino Duemilanove board, my first real project with it? Control Voltage output to control my self titled Uranus synthesizer (based on the Voice of Saturn synth). In any case, after a couple long nights I cam up with the sketch bellow, I've tested it and it seems to work with a little adjustment from the pot on the output.

I have yet to attempt at getting the thing tuned, but by runing the PWM output of the Fading sketch (a steady ramp up and down from 1 to 255) i was able to verify that it does indeed control my rather excentric synth. Thoughts, suggestions and critics welcome.

NOTE: The capacitor in the lowpass filter at the bottom is 470 uF, apologies for not adding the value.



Arduino Control Voltage by Dana Simmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at code.google.com.

Got boxes? Got Drums!

Inspiration often strikes in peculiar ways, lately, I was struck to bang on random resonant packaging materials and record the sounds they make. I assembled them into a hydrogen drum kit [download drumkit][Broken link now fixed] and composed a simple little percussion piece to demonstrate. Hurray for percussion!

Check out the Waxy Ear myspace and listen to the resulting BoxJar Jam song

Build Pics: Home LAMP server

As promised, I've uploaded some pictures of my latest project: A home network LAMP/Backup/Print server. Details on configuration and ub3r tweaks next time.

I chose a micro ATX case, for slim compact size

Time to roll up the sleeves and get dirty!

It's a GeForce 7050M Motherboard

The three hard drives which will handle all the data (two 500 gig sata, one 80 gig ide)

One of the two drive trays to hold the RAID 1 array

It's coming together!

Installing Debian. (Before I realized it was much simpler to do a net-install via usb flash drive)

And that's that. This little workhorse has proven to be a very valuable investment. Besides backing up my main workstation every night to the RAID 1, It runs TorrentFlux to manage bittorrent downloads and also servers as a CUPS host to my home network for printing.

Prelminary descrete circuitry guitar amp.

Above is pictured a very simple and wonderfully bad guitar amp circuit. The output is weak and horribly distorted but it works and can sound quite interesting.

After doing more research I noticed a striking similarity to my circuit and an NPN based Fuzz Face circuit

New Linux box!! Hurray!

Just like the title says, I put the finishing touches on a new home network/backup/print/file/misc server box this past week. Of course I took lots of pictures (to be posted soon) but I've included the specs for the new machine below.

- GeForce 7050M mobo
- AMD Athlon64 1620 cpu
- 512 MB ram
- 2x 500 gig Maxtor SATA drives (RAID 1 backup system)
- 1x 80 gig Maxtor IDE system drive
- Micro ATX form factor
- Debian 64 bit operating system

Pictures to come soon!!

AIA Edition, stuff I do

AIA Edition Show 5


Just one of the broadcasts I've been a part of over the past months. AIA Media is a student run news/digital media/digital film group based out of the Art Institute of Atlanta. It's a fantastic group of students who have chosen to turn their talents in video and audio production into a career. This video is one of our many productions and there are many more to come.

Headphone/Monitor Switch in a can

Frustrated with having my monitors and headphones amp on separate outputs. I cooked up this wacky and simple switcher to select where to send the main outputs from my desktop workstation P.C.

Basically it is just a DPDT switch wired up to a set up 1/4" TR inputs, fed from outputs 1 and 2 of my sound card. The switch can either trow the signal to the headphones amp or the monitors. I simply grabbed the closet empty semi rigid container I could find  (I.E: empty soda can) to house the wiring and such. In the pictures below I've only completed 2/3 of the wiring as I still have to add a second set of outputs (I ran out of female 1/4" TR plugs). Thus, in it's current state it simply acts as a glorified on/off switch. Once I get some more TR plugs I'll put it all in a proper enclosure and it will find a happy home on my desk. Build pictures bellow.

I scavenged some 1/4" female plugs from an old mixer. Bellow are all the build materials (minus two female TR plugs of course)

Here is the can with the holes punched out, I just used a flat head screwdriver and a little ub3r skill to cut "X"s in the aluminum, then simply folded the corners in.

Soldering the TR plugs:

Inside the can after all the TR plugs are installed

After the switch gets installed

And finally 2/3 of the finished project