Sunday, June 5, 2022

EHX 16 SECOND DELAY MOD




A friend of a friend contacted me in the summer of 2020 to have his EHX 16 Second Delay reissue modified. I had done some pedal mods for him in the past, so I was willing to give it a go, even though I was pretty bogged down with remodeling projects in my house. I was happy to be in my shop again and working with something other than drywall.. I didn't end up finishing the mod until the winter of 2021, but the owner didn't seem to mind the wait. Thanks Joe!

FUNKY GLITCH BUDDY-REVISED



While cleaning shop, I came across an old friend. I built this little keyboard monster back in 2013. The FUNKY GLITCH BUDDY was an interesting concept, but it suffered from some pretty challenging design flaws that I had always wanted to fix, but never had the time. For one, the keyboard would draw so much current due to the fact that the keys were all infrared proximity sensors. There were a lot of 7400 series chips and opto-isolators in the design too, so overall this thing was pretty inefficient and noisy. Two of the voices were 8-bit LFSR noise generators which didn't particularly sound like noise. The third oscillator was a basic two transistor oscillator that I ripped out of a cheap organ toy, and had died some time ago. At the time of this build, I had just started using my CNC to engrave and cut my own circuit boards. This was my first project using the CNC, and the design and orientation was pretty sloppy. Everything was jammed together, and I never even took the time to draw out my schematics, so finding and fixing problems years later was difficult to do. Instead I thought it would be quicker and more fun to just completely redesign the circuit.

Saturday, June 4, 2022

WADDINGTONS COMPUTE-A-TUNE



Hello!?...
I have been clearing out my workshop and getting rid of things I don't want or have time for, in the hopes of someday getting back to circuit bending and blogging again, but just for my own amusement.
I am making a lot of progress, and my workshop is looking great, but I have run into some things that are too precious to throw out but not worthy of selling in the condition they are in. I had been holding onto this Waddingtons Compute-A-Tune for at least a decade, and I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. It had some major issues and was not worth even trying to sell for $20...
The Compute-A-Tune is a very old toy keyboard that i think was only sold in the UK in the early 80's. The synthesizer is based around the TMS1000, which if I am not mistaken-was the first microcontroller!