Festival season is here! And since we like glowsticks, but don’t like their nonrecyclable nature – we decided to go all out on a bunch of LED toys! Behold: Each smiley features 20 LEDs in a Charlieplexed setup running on an Atmel Attiny85. The smiley PCBs were done by DirtyPCBs.com. They arrived Read more…
“I have wanted a good delay effect box for a long time. There are uncountably many delay plugins out there, but hardware has its own merits. I had experimented with the concept of deeply modulated delay lines several years ago in a buzz effect called “ld zdelay”, and it would be lovely Read more…
The Goldfish v4 user-interface board has been ordered! The new big protoboards too! A batch of tiny protoboards too! And a set of LED badges for the summer festivals where we shall be jumping around! Goldfish v4 UI board: Festival LED badge: Small Protoboard: Large protoboard:
The UI board for the Goldfish v4 is almost ready for production (post will follow soon) – so the search for fancy factories has begun! I was quite charmed by the colours of this fish: (found here: http://www.andreaharner.com/archives/2007/11/sos_goldfish_na.html) Which led me to search for circuitboards with white soldermasks and red Read more…
Quadtrees never fail to amuse. Source + binary (C#, Visual Studio 2012): QuadTreeImageToy Loosely based on http://devmag.org.za/2011/02/23/quadtrees-implementation/ The usual disclaimer applies: batteries not entirely included, unoptimized, it could be done cleaner.. but it was fun to mess with for a few hours. Most of the interesting code can be found in Read more…
While searching for some easy-to-add USB options for the new Goldfish development, I revisisted the V-USB package. This package allows you to add USB to any small microcontroller that can add an interrupt to a pinchange. Link: http://vusb.wikidot.com/ While digging through earlier projects using this library, I found this amazing Read more…
The FPGA-based Goldfish is still in constant flux. I decided it needed more encoders on the frontpanel, AND some visual feedback for the value of each of the encoders. Each encoder now has 16 LEDs around it to show the current value/meaning. Apparently there are some suppliers that build complete Read more…
After playing with the FPGA boards for a while, I decided to completely overhaul the Goldfish board. Spending a bit more time and money will make this box much more useful for the coming years of audiovisual experiments! The current preliminary hardware feature set: Spartan 6 LX9 FPGA Freescale MK20 Read more…
This Is Not Rocket Science is all about sharing the knowledge on how to make things. We have quietly been working on our first guide (which might grow in to a full book or wiki eventually) It is still very much a work in progress – but usable nonetheless. Here Read more…
The happy Australian is at it again! This time, he talks about designing boards with FPGAs and explains various things about using tiny BGA (ball grid array) chips. These 3x3mm FPGAs have 36 connector-balls underneath, spaced only 0.4mm apart. Making circuit boards for these chips is still a bit too Read more…