Vacoloco Ramblings

well, I’ve been a little quiet of late so I thought I’d give a quick rundown of what’s been going on.

• GorF, I’ve sold a few more kits (about another 30) and I’m out of parts for kit5, I’ll be ordering them in a week.
• Music wise, my new band had it’s first gig, 20 songs, 5 of which I knew well, and 15 of which I’d never played before. It all went quite well, I made a coupe of mistakes, but we have another gig on the 18th of July and I have three more songs to learn.

GorF Version 0.27 is up, this allows chaining of two patterns, to do this

- Press Load
- Press two patterns, any two.
- It’s say “CHN” showing that it’s in chain mode.
- When you exit Load mode, you’ll notice that the first letter of the current mode (note, velo, cc1, etc) changes from lower case to upper case. When in lower case, the lowest number of the two patterns is being edited, when in upper case the higher of the two patterns.

This does mean you have to be careful about what step you’re editing in which half.

Root Note, Sync, Pot Scale, Speed, CC1 and CC2 values are taken form the lower numbered of the two patterns in the chain.

When saving, you can only save both halves at the same time, into the same locations they are currently (unlike single pattern mode where you can save a pattern anywhere).

If you press only one pattern when in Load mode you’ll see “sin” showing you’re playing a single pattern.

Sysex file is available from the downloads section of the GorF webpages

Well it’s been a while but what a doozy of an update I’ve got for you,

Firstly, I’ve got GorF now chaining two patterns, though at the moment it doesn’t remember edits to the two patterns, you can now link them and have 16 notes playing. Once I’ve got an edit buffer in I’ll be posting the new code and sysex file.

In other news, a GorF user called Mark had a friend of his, Chris make a perspex case kit for GorF. Chris going to be selling them himself and you can contact him by emailing him here - muddy250( at )yahoo.co.uk . I’ve got mine on order and here’s the video of the kit and how to assemble it.

Ladies and Gents,

 I have some more GorF kits for sale. I’m also dropping kits 3 and 4, as I only sold 2. Most people seem to want either Kit 5 (90% of orders) or Kit 2 (about 9%).

 I’ve added the Crystal Oscillator module to Kit 5, as a lot of people seemed to be struggling to find them, I have had to increase the cost to cover the cost of the part.

Kit 1 (7 UKP) , PCB only (I have plenty of these), postage is

• 1 UKP to the UK
• 2 UKP to Europe
• 3 UKP to the US
• 4 UKP to anywhere else in the world

Actually two things, firstly apictures with yours truly in, secondly me smiling in them.

These are pictures from the Highway 5 Gig, no particular order. Click for bigger images. I’m the muppet in the red Atari T-Shirt. In case you’re wondering, we had a “guest” guitarist for a couple of the songs.

Thanks to FireGnat for taking these.

More as they come in.

WOW, what a great night!

As some of you know I left my band, Ten Fifty, and I’ve been rehearsing with Highway 5 as stand in bassist for Ben as he’d double booked himself with his band, Absolute Ataxia, that night. I’ve learned 22 songs, and they kindly agreed to play Jelly & Ice Cream (one of my favourites).

Well the gig was awesome, I haven’t enjoy myself so much in a long time. Noor and Duncan are both really professional musicians and I was worried about letting them down. It seems they’re both enjoyed the evening as much as I did, and it seems, so did the punters at the lamb (we had ‘em singing!).

The set list was follows :

Set 1:

• Another Day, Another Disappoinment (H5)
• Gonna Make It Big (H5)
• The Fear (H5)
• Motorway Madness (H5)
• Long Shadow (H5)
• MTTR1 (H5)
• Capturing The Zeitgeist (H5)
• Montgomery Park
• Angry Once Again (we didn’t play this as we over ran)
• MTTR2 (H5)

Ladies and Gents,

 Version 0.23 of the firmware for GorF is available here. This includes two bug fixes.

• Stuck notes, if you happen to change a note value whilst it’s playing that step, it sometimes gave you stuck notes.
• Jittery Pots, many people seem to be experiencing jittery pots (the values don’t seem to remain stable so the display looks like it’s jiggling), so there’s now a Moving Average Window Filter included for reading the pot values which seems to have smoothed things out considerably (Thanks to Eric Bromaugh for helping me understand the concept). It also uses the left most digit to show which pot is changing (1 to 8).

This isn’t a version 1.00 release because I’m still working on chaining of patterns, I have the basics working, but I’ev not yet found a suitable method for editing the second half of the pattern. I’ll be tinkering with this during the next week or so.

Also on the downloads page is the source code for this release, once I get the pattern chain in, it’ll goto version 1.00 and the source will be uploaded.

It’s worth noting that you need to send the sysex to GorF slowly, if you send it too fast it may look like it’s worked but may actually be corrupt. I will improve the bootloader to find out why it’s not doing the checksum correctly and flagging up when it’s gone wrong.

People have used Mac OSX SysEx librarian running at 200 bytes a second to update GorF and done so successfully, it does mean it takes longer to update, but it also means it’ll work first time.

With Midi-Ox, I’d suggest an output buffer size of 64 bytes, number of output buffers 2, delay between buffers of 800mSec.

A few people have had problems with their GorF kits, this has been tracked down to an issue with the orientation of the switches. So I’ll explain in more detail here.

The switches do have a “+” on the bottom of them, and this pin must go into the hole nearest the “+” sign on the position for the PCB. Now the “+” on the switch is not very clear, so here’s another way to tell.

(Click on any of the pictures for a high-res version)

Above is a picture of the offending switch view from one side. Notice how one edge is lower than the other? in this picture, the right hand edge has a “notch” or “step” compared with the left hand side. Here’s a better shot from the side.

here you can clearly see that the top right hand edge has a “step” when compared with the left. 

Well, on GorF this “step” should be at the top of all switches, here’s a picture showing this in my GorF,

Notice how all the “steps” line up along both rows of switches?

Here’s another from above,

again, notice the “top” edge of the switches (closest to the 7 segment displays) has the “step” in?

If you do this when in install your switches and also double check by looking for the little “+” on the bottom (I couldn’t get a good picture of the switch to show this) and ensure it’s lined up with the plus on the PCB you should have no problems.

as for the LEDs, again, check they’re in the correct way round and the 7 segment displays (the dot should be in the bottom right hand corner).

Happy building!

Just a quick update to say, I’ve ordered parts to put together some more kits and I’ve had most of the parts, but the pots are due the 14th of April, a little over two weeks from now.

Paul

Well, since leaving my band (Ten Fifty), I’ve had a nice break, done plenty of work on GorF and feel like I’ve rediscovered my love and passion for music. I’ve really been enjoying rehearsing with Highway 5 and although the gig on the 28th of march got cancelled, I’m still playing on the 3rd of April with them at the Lamb in Malvern, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’d like say a huge thankyou to Noor and Duncan from Highway 5 for restoring my love of music and faith in people!

I’ve learned 22 songs, in a shade over 8 weeks, and all but one or two minor issues I’m pretty much ready to gig.

In fact, I’ve enjoyed it so much, that I’ve decided to try and form (or join) a new band, most likely a three piece, playing a mix of good old rock n roll classics and some original stuff.

So, if you know a band looking for a bassist, or a drummer and a guitarist/singer in the West-Midlands (UK) drop me a line!