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It’s been a month, or two
It’s been a while since I wrote, a lot has been going on. Firstly, the Transputer saga, I got a PCB from Oscar Toledo (https://github.com/nanochess/transputer) and confirmed that my TRAMs did indeed pass the tests with his card. However they did not with mine. Then I discovered that somehow none of my TRAMs worked with Oscar’s or my card. Very disheartening. So I’ve paused that for a while, there’s only so much failure you can take before you have to stop something for a bit. In the world of synths it seems things are slowing down globally, in part due to an orange womble in the USA. I have to…
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YASP update & name
I’ve decided on a name, at least for now, TinySynth. Basically because, well, it’s tiny. So a lot has, and hasn’t happened, it’s sort of being developed in fits and starts as and when I have the beans to work on it. Which I’m fine with. So let’s jump to it. First we got the display working, this was based on some code my partner had done for another project, so there are some psudo 7 segment digits counting from 0 to 999. Then we got the LEDs and switches working, these are on a pair of PCA9555 I2C GPIO expanders, so two wires gives me 32 GPIO lines, neat!…
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YASP (Yet Another Synth Project)
ok, ok, I know, I should finish something first…… but…. no seriously, let me explain…. So one of the things that frustrates me is having to sit in my study of an evening to play with my synths, it takes me away from my other half and my Suzi dog. Now my other half usually plays games on her laptop, or sometimes does some coding, so I figured why not make something I can have sat on the sofa next to me instead of needing my lab, power supplies, big screens, etc. So I remembered I had this rather nice little Alchitry FPGA dev board, I found that someone had…
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Even more synth updates
Things have been moving with synth projects this last month, first up the Quardowave card for the Isla Instruments Caladan has arrived, I’ve assembled it, checked power and got blink working on the CPUs. I still have to debug the VCFs but the other parts, like DACs and VCAs are the same as the OPL3 card I’ve been working on for Isla Instruments, so they shouldn’t be a problem. The next job is coding the CPUs and getting some sounds out.I’m looking forward to getting this up and running and making some sounds, it should sound epic. In other news the prototype voice holder for Delta has arrived and been…
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What’s been happening?
Well I failed at posting once a month, my bad. A lot has been going on since March. I’ve been talking to the new owners of Modal Electronics on and off, since September, and I just stepped away from it. My reasons? There are a few, but mostly because their vision and what I am passionate about in synths are very different things. There were a number of other factors involved, but I won’t go into them. I’ve also not been well, for the couple of weeks I’ve been having major chest pains that come and go, a few days ago I ended up in an ambulance on my way…