Vacoloco Ramblings

Well, I’ve put together 10 more kits, of the people who contacted me and gave me their email address five have bought kits.

This leaves 5 4 more “kit 6″ to be sold, these will be the last full kits I make and will leave me only 4 or 5 GorF PCBs left to sell.

Kit 6 includes the following

• 1 x PCB
• 1 x PreProgrammed Micro
• 12 x Switches
• 12 x Switch Caps
• 4 x Seven Segment Displays
• 1 x 16Mhz Oscillator
• 1 x 5V Regulator
• 8 x Potentiometeres
• 1 x I2C EEPROM
• 2 x MIDI Sockets

The price is 80 GBP plus shipping (2.00 GBP to the UK, 4.00 GBP to Europe, 6.00 GBP to the US, 7.00 GBP to anywhere else). All you’ll need to find is 8 x step LEDs, the resistors, diodes, capacitor and time to put it together.

If you want one, email me - yo (at) vacoloco.net and I’ll pass you details of my paypal account details.

Is there anyone in the UK that would be willing to work with me making a case for Defender?

My previous efforts (below) at wooden cases sort of suck. What I really want is an angled front panel with the keys in the bottom, a bit like a minimoog with it’s panel angled, but not adjustable, just angled up all the time. The keyboard is only 3 octaves and is the same length as the panel.

If you’re interested, let me know, I’m happy to pay for wood and some time, but I’m not loaded (who is these days?).

No, don’t panic, the panel layout is staying the same. What is changing is the backend for the panel, I had numerous problems with the first revision of the panel control board, mostly with it talking to the main CPU board and then the voice.

So, I’ve shrunk things, the panel board now controls the voices, handles MIDI and will handle patch storage. This all fits onto a 100 x 80 mm PCB (I love surface mount). Below is the PCB almost assembled (I’m missing the pull ups for the switches). I have two of these and I’m sure the other will come in useful soon for something.

Below is the current PCB in situ, I plan to rewire this to the new panel PCB soon.

Well, I know it’s been a while since I mentioned QiX, and we’ve gone through a lot of changes.

We’ve settled on an ARM 9 based CPU (i.MX233) and a DSP56720 (dual core 400MIPS) as starting points. Both of these are available in QFP formats, so the cost of prototyping is low (which is always a good thing).

To this end, I’ve got one of the i.MX233 development board, and getting Linux up and running was a no brainer, it came with it. Hooked up a screen typed a few command lines and bingo, pictures below. What this does mean is that Freescale have a BSP for it, so a large portion of the work is already done. It will also boot from SD card, so that’s my next step, building a Linux kernel on SD.

I intend to get this talking to the SoundBite board I also have from Freescale, so I can get a pretty powerful DSP development system.

I have the parts arriving for 10 more kits.

I’ll call these “kit 6″, and they will contain:

• 1 x PCB
• 1 x Micro (pre programmed)
• 12  x Switches
• 12  x Switch Caps
• 4 x 7 Segment Displays
• 1 x 16Mhz Oscillator
• 1 x 5V Regulator
• 8 x Potentiometers
• 1 x I2C EEPROM
• 2 x MIDI Sockets

Well, it’s a new year (for those who missed it, SURPRISE!!) and GorF is done, so what next?

Well, I’m going to be focusing on two projects this year, and only two. in no particular order;

Defender:-

It seems a shame to have that lovely panel sitting there dead, and a voice card that works doing nothing, so I’ve done a bit of re-engineering and redone the panel PCB. So, instead of having a panel PCB connecting to a master micro which has MIDI and controls the voices, I have included the MIDI on the panel PCB, a MEGA128 micro and an I2C EEPROM for patch storage. The board will handle 192 LEDs, 192 Switches and 32 analogue inputs. Here’s a picture of the PCB in Eagle, boards have been ordered;

The other project that I’m focusing on, is the QiX project. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s a hybrid CPU and DSP on a board. A bit like the Sound-Art Chameleon, but on Steroids. The CPU for the first one will be an i.MX233 ARM9 system on a chip (Freescale video on YouTube) and a dual core 56k DSP, a bit like the soundbite board from Freescale, but with external memory.

Well, I finally got around to recording and editing a GorF video guide. it’s in two parts as YouTube won’t allow me to upload more than 10 minutes of video.

So, without further ado;

Well, what would you know, I was tidying up my “parts bin” and found 10 more GorF PCBs, these are ones I took to Synth DIY UK 2009 and never sold (everyone bought full kits).

So, I’m considering doing a run of another 10 “hard to find parts” kits, so this would include:

• PCB
• Micro (pre programmed)
• Switches + Caps
• 7 Segment Displays
• 16Mhz Oscillator
• 5V Regulator
• Potentiometers
• I2C EEPROM
• MIDI Sockets

Well, it’s finally here.

I’ve managed to get some time this week and put in the last few touches. We now have support for 64 sequences, 8 banks, each with 8 sequences. You’ll need to have the I2C EEPROM to get banks 2 - 8 to work, and they’re a little bit slower when loading and saving, so you’ll get a bit of a hiccup using these, sorry nothing I can do about that.

On this note, loading and saving has changed slightly. Now you push the load button once and you can load a sequence from the current bank. Press the load button again and you can now select the bank. Pushing the load button again, will take you back to sequence selection. To get out of this, push the mode button.

The same is true for the save button, it’s a little different to previous, but it should be fairly intuitive.

To support the fact that you might load “random” sequences from the new EEPROM before you’ve saved anything valid, I’ve included a check for the data in a sequence as far as possible, so you shouldn’t get any steps that are 255 clocks long and a sequence length of 255 steps. If this does happen you’ll see “BAD DATA” on the display and it’ll change the values to some defaults (8 steps, 12 clocks per step length and so on).

There’s also now a “snap” mode for the knobs, so if you have a slightly unstable power supply this should help saving unplanned value jumps when moving around GorF. Pressing step button 1 when in control mode toggles it on/off. When enabled if you turn a knob and it’s above the value you’ll see “hi” if it’s lower you’ll see “lo”, then as you hit the current value, it’ll “snap” and start changing the value.

I’ve updated the GorF downloads page with the new sysex file, the files needed for AVR Studio and also the source code for version 1.00. I’ll be creating a video in a few days time and uploading it to my YouTube page running through each feature.

Unless there’s any major bugs I don’t plan to add any more features. GorF has already gone way beyond what I had originally intended and I have other projects I really want to get moving (like Defender) and now I have the perfect test tool for my bench.

I want to thank everyone who’s purchased a GorF kit I never thought they’d sell so well. I purchased 100 PCBs a year ago and I now only have 5 left. I am amazed at the positive response this project has had and flattered at all the words of support I’ve received, thank you to each and every one of you, you guys made GorF what it is.

Finally I got the blasted I2C EEPROM working…. turns out I had two faults;

1. I was missing the 10mS delay at the end of the write! Thanks to Peter Ullrich for spotting that.
2. I had made a mistake with the way I addressed the data, in a way that meant I could only write data to one patch in a bank, writing to the same bank would corrupt the other patches, what a muppet!