vidiotsquad

scanjector page is up….

on top of the 32 modules for the interactive light installation i’m working on for Natalie Lambert, the scanners arrive tomorrow from Dav of Pointless Creations. some serious hacking and mangling of these will be required to retrofit an lcd projector instead of the halogen light and gobo’s that are in there just now.

this could be a lot of fun! however i have realised i could do with 36 hours in a day instead of the standard 24….

Well things are hotting up round here with the impending start of the GI festival. With each passing day I get roped into assisting with more and more shows!
There’s some wonderful stuff coming up, including A Typical Root, Vestiges Park and the Beer and Pub Project. See the previews at Glasgow Internationa

Now that Christmas is over, I’ve had chance to build the kit I bought from highly liquid. I’ve had a few of these in the past, and they are really good quality and easy to build and use, highly recommend!

Took about an hour to build and about 15 minutes to install into my dr-110 to replace the arduino-midi converter I whipped up on strip board that was in there.

i’ve been updating the synth pages with some schematics for cmos based noise boxes.

synth pages…>>>

While trying to decide what to do with 10 of these 4052b demultiplexers I bought by mistake, I stumbled upon an interesting method of creating a squarewave step sequencer! Its perfect apart from the fact there are only 4 steps, but the method works, so 8 and 16 step versions should be no problem at all, even if it does involve a shed load of diodes…

The issue with these cmos oscillators is the fact they aren’t voltage controlled in the normal sense, so using the standard Baby10 style 4017 sequencer wasnt really an option, until now! So far I have a tempo control, four individual step pitch controls and a master tune control, all running off of 2 oscillators and a handful of components and IC’s.

I love these cmos IC’s, they are like Lego building blocks for noise!!!

Video to follow when i find the camera…..

A while back i posted this, and it’s been sitting on the self for quite some time! I pulled it out the other day to use as a project for my course, as an example of how cmos chips can be tricked into producing entertaining techno-esque-squelchy-ish sounds.

Its only capable of square wave synthesis, but whats the harm in that when it produces noises like this! With a few extra components you can convert the output into different wave formations, but at that point we start getting into proper synth building, so we’ll keep it simple for the time being.

Since the last post about this, I’ve been adding a few extra circuits, but kept the original which contained an interesting starve function for the vactrol. To be honest it was a complete accident that i found this, as its not your usual starve circuit that restricts the current to the output, but it works, and nothing melted, which is always nice, so it stayed.

I’ve had a few emails about this, but i’ve never documented it, which i am in the process of doing just now. So hold your horse’s, somethings coming shortly with schematics and if i get round to it…. Eagle files as well.

Several years ago I used to co-promote a club night in Glasgow called Cypher, with my good friend Chris and a lot of help from some friends, mostly the dark-haired one called D (cheers!).

We “acquired” an Optisolar 250 gobo projector, and we spent a small fortune on a metal gobo with our logo for the events. I was always intriegued to see if it would be possible to build a small, portable slide projector for advertising purposes, something we could mount in the street and leave, so it had to be cheap enough and easy to build so that if it was stolen/broken/confiscated then it wouldn’t be any great loss. But as usual it was always just a bit of a pipe dream, until now.

I’ve been playing around with this again in recently, and so far have tried a number of options involving Luxeon LED’s, 35mm slides, small LCD displays, Li-Ion batteries, various lenses(from slide projectors, cameras telescopes etc) and a host of other components for constant current circuits, and more recently i’ve been investigating the use of lasers for this project.

There’s a few sites around these days with similar ideas and inspiration.

Graffiti Research Lab Seriously good projects to combine graf and electronics. Unfortunately i dont have a powerful projector at my dispossal, plus its likely to be stolen, broken or confiscated round these parts, and ideally I want to mount this and walk away for these reasons, so its got to be “disposable” in a sense.

Troika A London based design collective who developed an ingenious hand held battery operated projector, that displays text messages! Not sure what their light source is, but it looks like their battery pack is a separate unit judging by the wire that disappears up the sleeve of the operator. A highly professional finish though like all their projects. I’d love a peek inside that thing.

Intructables.com Loads of good tutorials for building things. Recently echo_anomie added his own instructable for his laser powered projector. He’s got some fantastic results out of it, and if my finished unit performs half as well then i’ll be happy!

“Reach for the lasers, safe as fuck!” er…. not quite, lasers will blind you kids! ;o)

Another option is to utilise light sources already in place, such as the powerful flood lights that lots of buildings have to illuminate them at night. I’d need to somehow containing the light with a sheet of metal, with a lens and a slide mounted to it, but thats a bit harder to try and test….

I’m still experimenting and writing up a page of its own for this project, so stop by shortly to see if there’s any progression.

I’ve been playing around with the square wave oscillators, alog with some ripple counters from the VGA synth, and a vactrol amongst other things, and have come up with a nice little circuit that creates rhythmical patterns.

This was wired up on a breadboard, so the switching between connections is jerky and not in sync. Expect a finished unit by the end of the week…. ish.

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These drums machines are great for bending, so many options for control surfaces and bend connections. This time i used a 28 way patch bay to control the bends, and 6 patchable switches to make connections on the fly. Along the bottom of the patch bay is a row of 6 sockets for making multiple connections between bends.

I installed a few LED’s in this for fun, they only indicate if a switch is on or off, not react to the drum patterns.

More >>>>