Author Archives: adrianwinward

Today was the final step for my FMP project – shooting a demo video for AXIOM. I was hoping to use a few GoPro cameras we have at UH but the quality was not sufficient, so I had to get a couple of Canon xf305s. This felt slightly overkill for the job at hand, butContinue reading “Shooting the Demo Video”

Once again there has been a gap in my posting here, and while not a huge amount has happened design wise, I have reached a rather significant milestone – tomorrow I will be giving out three units for testing by other people! Since my last post here, the main changes have been: A second versionContinue reading “Review models”

It turns out I do still have more to blog about! Firstly, my 2mm acrylic sheet turned up in the post, so I got my proper faceplates laser cut. I decided that adding silver paint into the etched areas would give the best effect, so gave this a go, and am really happy with howContinue reading “Improved Faceplate and Software Tweaks”

Today I added the resistor ladder mentioned in my previous post, improving the usefulness of the CV inputs. This is not a particularly pretty fix, as it involves cutting eight traces and then adding an extra 16 resistors, but at least these are all sandwiched between the two boards and not immediately visible. A quickContinue reading “Further Circuit Board Modification”

Yesterday I popped in the University to get my test faceplates laser cut, and while I was there I picked up the UH Modular System to do some testing with. Firstly, my module does indeed fit into the case and the screw holes are in the right places! As mentioned in my previous post, theContinue reading “Testing with a Modular System”

Now that the module itself is mostly operational, I needed a way to actually mount it into a Eurorack skiff. Doepfer specify the use of 2mm anodised aluminium for faceplates, but this is not particularly easy to cut precisely without specialised equipment which I do not have access to. However, we do have a laserContinue reading “Faceplate Design and Test”

My circuit boards arrived in the post, and they look great! I had also already ordered the remaining parts to build up a module, so I got the soldering iron out and began construction! Thankfully, all of my parts fitted the board nicely, and I ended up with a very professional looking pair of boardsContinue reading “Circuit Board Arrival”

After a couple of hours getting the new display setup, I realised that I had come across a rather serious problem. The screen refreshing was hogging the processing power of the limited ATMEGA328p microprocessor that I am using, and was slowing things down so much that the output signals were not working properly. Things seemedContinue reading “Code Optimisation and Bugs”

Now that I had settled on a display (the 1.3″ 128×64 LED screen), I needed to adjust my code to address it rather than the display I had previously been using. Before getting the code to work, I needed to settle on a user interface. As the display is most efficiently programmed using a monospaceContinue reading “Display and UI”

I have not posted on this blog in almost a month, but I have good reason! Firstly, I had to wait for my circuit boards to be produced and shipped which took 3 weeks. More importantly, my daughter was born! Whilst I was able to get some work done over the past couple of weeksContinue reading “Excuses, excuses…”