Oh heck, totally forgot about this kit I got like 10 years ago and never finished. Y'all ever make a wall clock out of individual diodes and transistors?
As I mentioned, since the power has been out for over a day, I took the household phones, laptops, and rechargable batteries to the library today to recharge them. This left my wife here without much in the way of entertainment, so before I left, she was asking if we had a portable radio around, preferably one that didn't need headphones.
This is where it comes in really handy that her stepdad sent me two electronics kits for Christmas: an AM radio, and an FM radio. (And that I built them both nearly as soon as I got them; I don't have a battery- or butane-powered soldering iron, so having them in pieces would be pretty useless.) So we set up the FM one and it's been playing music all day.
As much as we sometimes question the utility of broadcast media in a world where people keep saying "everybody has a smartphone", it's really nice to have these fallbacks, because there will always be emergencies and outages.
With Reddit being considered an active hostile, does anyone know any good places to learn about DIY analog synth circuits with/from human interaction? I'm gonna keep digging around on my own, but Google is terrible for finding forums.
The photo above is of a 2011 iMac, installed with a new 2020 Mac Mini M1 logic board. It's a lot of effort to avoid buying a 27" monitor, but it's a pretty solid use for an 11+ year-old desktop.
The kit is currently on kickstarter, made & sold by the badasses over at JuicyCrumb.
The machine has 4 voice circuits, they are on the board with visible components. From left to right; a kick drum, two toms/clavs, and a noise voice. The voices are triggered in different combinations to simulate 7 different drums, with varying degrees of verisimilitude.
There are 10 preset patterns selected by buttons on the front panel. Although not designed to play more then one pattern at a time, it is possible to force more then one button down at a time.
The machine has no memory, the patterns are etched onto the circuit board. All the other circuitry is made with discrete transistors.
This particular unit has no case, No idea how that happened. but I'm putting it into a 2u rack-mount enclosure. It also didn't work, but I fixed that some time ago.
So I slapped the 20MHz crystal on the ATtiny84, but it turns out that I definitely forgot to set the fuse bits for the external oscillator when I flashed the memory. So now I gotta figure out how to so that (which is good because I completely forgot how avrdude works)
the thing works! gotta experiment w/ the clipping diodes a bit, schem calls for 1n4148 but eh dont love em that much in this set up. ill need to fiddle w/ settigns for a bit before i decide whatll stay in there. still need to figure out how the 2nd dual opamp set up works it like sorta makes sense intuitively but the specifics are a bit mysterious still w/ how the clipping set up is done and why the opamp set up is like that.
accidentally wired drive knob backwards but i am not getting back in there rn.