It's true that I'm drowning in unfinished projects but this one was a fun afternoon project. Sometimes I need a small project in between just to get some fresh air and I was missing a good small keyboard for playing small synths anyway. So I ordered a Roland K-25m. It's meant to be used with the Roland boutique series and connects via a 16 pin IDC connector (the same that Eurorack also uses). I found some documentation about it here and decided to pick one up and wire it to a Raspberry Pi Pico:
The MFB Nanozwerg is a small Synthesizer from Berlin. Nobody talks about it and it's often overlooked but you can get a really wide range of sounds out of it. I've been using it for acid lines and even thicker sounds thanks to its pulse width modulation. Its MIDI implementation …
I decided long ago that I'd be there in Spain for this year's total solar eclipse, but I'm only just starting to finalize my plans for it because I kept putting it off. Not a smart thing to do, mind you, because the global interest around such an event is sure to bring lots of people to the country, making it harder to book a flight or find accommodation the longer you wait. General laziness on my part played a role in this of course, but also this event is also just not that easy to plan for. Even within …
I often think about how well the internet can preserve data. It's not that rare that I'll stumble upon some forum with messages from the early 2000s. Even when something does eventually become inaccessible, there's always a chance that the data is out there somewhere, resting on someone's hard drive and just waiting to be released again. I wonder if the things I've created will outlive me through the internet and if there are gonna be people who enjoy them even after I'm gone. As weird as it is, this is what gives me motivation sometimes to finish a project …
When I do translation I'll often perform "exact match" searches on Google. This is a good way to gauge how common an exact phrase is and to find the context in which people use certain expressions and idioms. This is to make sure what I write comes off as natural, and that I've got the meaning right.
But occasionally I'll see a result that makes me pause because of how unexpected the context is. I'll stop what I'm doing and go check the website out. It's sites I would never find under normal circumstances: hidden forums with decade-old posts, …
It's so easy and fast to print circuit boards using one of the well known factories. I could just upload my files and have it printed in a matter of days. However, I'm not in this project for easy and fast, but I'm also impatient. It's a weird space where I feel like printing a circuit board at home and spending hours preparing it gets me there faster.
To be honest, it makes little sense in this case but I feel drawn to making everything at home. So I looked into …
Over the course of my life I always find myself returning to life service games — web-based MMOs in the past and gacha games in recent years. Yet when I look back on these games without the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, there isn't a single one I'd consider good. More often than not they are riddled with pay-to-win elements, predatory tactics or simply just lazy game design. So what gives?
I think I may be romanticizing the idea of a game that stays with you for a big portion of your life, one that grows and changes with you. …
I got my first cassette recorder when I was 3 or 4 years old. It was small enough to be carried around so I naturally recorded everything around me. Two of those recordings survived and I still have them here, waiting to be listened to one day.
Cassettes taught me that information can be stored on media that you can't see with your naked eye. When I got my first computer at 5 years old, the concept of files stored on a computer came naturally to me. My mom's computer had access to the internet so we would sometimes …
It feels like I'm starting all over again but it's for the best. Before last week, all I had access to were low resolution photos of the circuit boards and the circuit diagram of the synth.
Follow via RSS or paperboat for all my 800DV posts.
Synths were much simpler in the 70s. No chips, only simple resistors, capacitors and transistors. To the point where it’s actually possible to draw and print the circuit boards, populate them with components and hopefully have a working synthesizer.
That’s what I’m doing right now. An invaluable resource have been photos of the back sides of the boards and lots of deep knowledge of …
Sometimes life can be a lot and I often feel how important it is to have a way to escape. I'm about to finish my degree in Digital Humanities, have job, some other side gigs and a kid and a partner. More often than not things stack up and it can take weeks before I get to work on my projects, make music or build something.
It's hard to really dive into something if there's not much time. As my energy drains, the threshold gets bigger and bigger and I'm less likely to pick up a drum machine or …
posted in Synthesizers
posted in 
posted in 
