fun a day 22
I'm going to try to make a quick thing a day during jan with my project.. some of those things might be music, some of them might just be pushing the software forward. Anyways, here is a little loop.
tdm for the drums and the first synth, sequencing the td-3 over midi.
I'm passing it through the m8, just for a little reverb & limiting.
fun a day 22
I got sample playback (loading straight from header files / flash) working, and shitty bpm control. Then my back hurt to much to make a tune.
Maybe today.
fun a day 22
yesterdays progress:
bonked my head against usb audio for a while. For some reason only one of my prototypes works with usb and I didn't quite get it working all the way (only mono, and not duplex).
I also rebuilt the LUTs that are used for filters etc with the correct inputs, however it doesn't seem to make a huge difference. I need to dig in more.
fun a day 22
another night of fighting usb ... I made some distinct progress, but still getting some kind of regular distortion. I think it has to do with mismatched buffer size or something.
anyways, I made a quick low effort tune, and looked briefly at how to unfuck my envelopes (I failed at unfucking them tonight, too tired)
fun a day 22
fixed the envelopes. Still haven't hooked up controls for them yet, but they are in there now.
fun a day 22
I should probably just remove the filters until I can get them not sounding like shit.
fun a day 22
Got new boards in the mail. The faceplate / back plates look great, I'm feeling semi confident about making a case for the whole unit.
I have a pretty spectacular fuckup in tbe big new chunk of hardware I added (power control system uses 1 ohm resistors instead of 100k ohm) but I was able to bodge everything into testability tonight.
At least one of the other fixes I made appears to work! Hopefully time tomorrow to check the other stuff.
fun a day 22
tonight spend more hardware time.
I've got headphone / line in detect working, but the power system seems to have some quite difficult to bodge errors. I'm thinking of rerolling that part on a little (cheap) test board, or maybe even breadboarding the whole thing.
fun a day 22
yeah - rerolled a test board - I could do this all with bread board able parts but... I don't want to.
this is a variation on my soft power switch setup, plus a little 1w speaker amp.
fun a day 22
working on save / load - my loading system was just reading random memory in for a second.
fun a day 22
pixel ui can get in the bin.
Trying to work out how to display this "pattern chain" concept - you have 16 slots, each that can display a value between 1-16, and somehow you need to highlight the currently active one.
fun a day 22
its almost enough to make me want to use 0-F hex for display.. probably too nerdy?
fun a day 22
Spent today working on a plastic back case. Feels nice and heavy with the battery in it.
fun a day 22
spent 4 hours last night trying to chase down some subtle distortion that is affecting all my output. I didn't figure it out :(
my current best guess is that the DAC isn't getting clean power, and thats where the noise is coming from? I'm pretty sure that the data I'm passing it is clean (I am just passing it straight signed ints from a wav file). But there are so many moving parts here its hard to tell.
fun a day 22
in more progressive news - i figured out why my batter powered unit is dying so quick, I'm using a voltage regulator that needs a 1v difference between its input and output. So when I pass it 4 v, it can only get 3 out. And the discharge curve for lipos is such that they only stay up above 4v for a short part of their discharge.
easy to fix, I found an alternate component to drop in already.
fun a day 22
Finally out of the "why the fuck is there high frequency noise on everything" nightmare, and it only cost me 1 entire day to figure out (and not a full board reroll)
fun a day 22
getting better at fixing things that are broken - tonight, bodged in https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/APX803S.pdf for the screen reset, and everything went to shit, because I cut an important power trace. I managed to bodge everything back into working order, and yep! it appears that the reset chip works. Huzzah.
fun a day 22
so now I have three somewhat functional units sitting on my desk. This is the highest yield from a prototype run so far.
fun a day 22
tomorrow night: I resolve to not fight usb ... at all. maybe just do a quick tune?