• Driveby update

    Kal • 01/27/2022 at 20:07 • 0 comments

    Progressing barely at all. The switchblock is glued and wired and it's beaut'. I started soldering the bits&bobs and regretted not doing more prefiguring. Still, i can run my thumb over these tight little posts...

    As lovely as it is to make progress, it's only later i recall having firmly decided to put the r-string on a separate bit of board. I even know which one. Now everything's just slightly too close to be perfect. One doesn't go backwards unless something's f'ed ((and nothing is f'ed here, dude)) but it's demoralizing.

    Could/might/should'a socketted it, too. To the shelf with ye. Someone say one project at a time? The door's over there.

    "Genius" in the front page of this project was a gag but then i looked at the header image and just loved it. I'm making a device by hand that makes a waveform with certain parameters i've selected by hand that you'll tune by making decisions by hand.

    In more detail, each column of the switchblock selects a channel on the 2nd mux to connect to a DAC out. The 1st mux cycles through each of the columns being hot because a timer tells a counter to tell it to. There'll be a pot for "sample" rate (the whole set of 16x4 bits/switches being the "sample") and, BONUS, additional switches to mess with the operation in (pre-imagined) ways (that i just sat and thought up--it's a bend of a circuit that doesn't exist yet). Further mods leap to the imagination.

    Somebody say it's going to be ...noisy? It'll be a noise between a hiss and a buzz. The door's still closing, don't let it hit you.

  • 3, 4...

    Kal • 11/08/2021 at 21:22 • 0 comments

    My numbering's surely wrong on these steps. Mid-glueing shot:

    E6000 asks you to take a minute after you smear and smush the glue to admire the almost Syd Mead-like symmetry and modernity of your project and let the glue set up. Then the surfaces mate almost fixed, still a little budgeable.

    These little blocks feel like solid sex in the hand. I want a project that's just one of them with a little something behind it...

  • Steps 1, 2

    Kal • 11/05/2021 at 19:42 • 0 comments

    Take a bunch of switches and glue them together longwize, then later glue pairs of the pairs together. It occurred to me while at it that just soldering wires between them would be strong enough, if fiddly to do. You, reading this, might rather mount them to a proper board or case or whatever. I didn't check, maybe these are protoboard-compatible but i bet not. I got them ages ago on the cheap and there were enough lying around so that's what i used.

    E6000 might've been just the right glue, too. But pairing 64 switches is 32 joints, then pairing those is another 16 joints and maybe you can guess the next step. Maybe i should've figured out some kind of jig or mount. But figgerin' the best way to do a project that never gets done is effort wasted worse than a well-enough done thing that gets done. Sometimes, anyway.

    Of course step #0 was a bunch of figuring already, with dead paths and boneheaded research and a lot of looking at datasheets. I think looking at datasheets doesn't monotonically increase knowledge.