Hello again. I took up boxing recently and immediately injured
both wrists making me unable to type, work at the bench efficiently, or play
musical instruments. Bummer!
These are a few of my favorite things.....
I thought I’d use this downtime to dictate ideas I’ve had for upcoming projects.
Then augment this post in coming weeks and months as untyped content aka SPTKTO, aka A Single Place To keep things Organized.
If this post reads like I’m talking into a mic it’s
because I am--the illustrations in this post are AI bogus generated but my prose never will be.
Control/Alt/Delete?
First things first--on my Windows 11 system how do I make Voice dictation
work--Remember I can’t type....
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| Is voice dictation in Windows 11 included for free? Yeh, right. Nothing in Windows 11 is included for free! |
After getting the internal microphone for my W11 computer working, I said into the mic “say voice access wake up” and Windows took me through a quick wizard; surprisingly it worked right after that.
To toggle the feature off I clicked on the mic icon in the top left of my main screen:
To kill the feature entirely: I right clicked on the Windows icon and issue Settings > Accessibility > Speech; toggling off Voice Access:
Overall, Window's ability to accurately transcribe voice turned out to be surprisingly good but at times frustratingly slow. I might look into other solutions.
Shut up and list the audio projects!
Previous post for the chip is here.
Next I’ll explore other uses for this very interesting integrated circuit--using it as a rheostat, for MCU programmable variable gain using an op amp, in all-pass filters, and a perennial favorite: analog multipliers.
My always-patient always-enthusiastic sponsor, PCBWAY, has already fabricated An experimenter's board for the rheostat.
Meaning: results for the rheostat application are coming in a future post--as soon as I can solder again and craft a design that's useful....
SBC's
DEE-ES-PEE
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| Any primate can write C++ with a $200/month Claude Subscription. But what about the damn layoffs? |
My interest in learning digital signal processing continues. I created simple proofs of concept using Python (post here) but feel (doh!) I have a whole, shit-ton lot more to learn. A scary smart tech in my audio Discord group turned me on to an amazing PDF--"The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing" by Steven W. Smith, find it On Github here .
The book covers (along with many other useful topics) DSP basics that are spot-on for what we do. The presention is not overly mathematical and contains examples a Fellow BAM Member leveraged to create a professional sounding -24db per octave low pass filter he brought to a recent meeting for a demonstration.
STRING SYNTH
Another long term project is creating from scratch and
analog string synthesizer based on top Octave generation, frequency dividers,
and some sort of attenuator probably based on the aforementioned DS1881. Another super talented dude from my Discord group has already written working C++ code for an RP2040-based top octave generator and shared it with me. Using that I have breadboarded a TOFGm frequency dividers and basic ADSR EG's, creating a few "Solina" notes on
the bench, but I’m not happy with the sonic results so far.
The work continues.
THE BEH-RINGER IDEA
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| If Behringer can rip these guys off why can't I? |
In the same Discord group I just mentioned, a few members and I have discussed jettisoning some or most all of our commercially available recording and electronic music hardware and replacing them with prototypes we design and build. Time-wise this is a bad idea but sounds like a challenge and a lot of fun.
For me low
hanging fruit are things like my Intellijel dual ADSR. I figure for the basis of this I will use the
one chip ADSR described in the post here--but who knows.
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| Roland's amazing JP8 was designed by some of the greatest audio engineers of all time. If they are the big leagues can I swing in single A? Maybe??? |
Related ideas include a programmable single voice PCB that can be expanded into a to 8 voice polyphonic synthesizer. So reverse engineering something like a Jupiter 8 or Prophet T8. Why not--
STOMPS
It’s been a long time, but in the past I’ve had fun making quarter-inch to quarter-inch guitar pedals. I might start doing that again. Also going through old paia frak designs, porting them to SMD, and possibly moving them to a new format like 5U or Eurorack.
ARTIFICIAL INSUFFERANCE
The 800 pound gorilla in the room: AI. This ever-useful, ever-terrifying potentially economy-busting technology has already changed every aspect of my 9 to 5 job. Actually it’s more like 24x7x365 job where the VIPs let me screw around with electronics when they don't need me to screw around with AI?
How to better incorporate AI into what we do here? Other than speeding creation of assembly BOMS and getting sometimes-accurate-sometimes-not OpenAI diatribes about electronics fundamentals I still don’t have a cluer--but figure I might wake up in the middle of night with
something.
A PLUG FROM MY SPONSOR: PCBWAY!
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| PCBWAY community's servers are not in orbit (yet). Check 'em out here. |
Once the ideas are off the drawing board and rise above the level of dog Doo I’ll need Prototype PCB's made; for that of course I’m going straight to This blog's wonderful sponsor: PCBWay--my work can, at times, be the doo of the dog, but theirs never is!!
You can greatly help this blog by checking them out--use the link here.
OUTTRO
Enough for now, I will expand the post if and when I come up with new ideas And hopefully once my wrist is better start Building things again.
See ya next time and don't spend all your tokens on one ride.
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