/346 - Moduloti Complete

I managed to get it all together and tested today! Currently it’s just passing midi from usb device (norns or ipad) and host (qunexus) to the Bitbox but it’s working great. The 4 encoders each have a push button and adjacent led so I can page through 4 sets of 4 parameters. I have a Sewastapol arriving sometime this week, so I’ll be able to use its send to run audio into Axoloti for more effects in the rack.

Hit record as I was playing around with things: field recordings from last winter at the park (remember that?), gamelan samples, and single cycle waveform drones. I’m beat, goodnight.

/345 - Sooooo Close

I tried my hardest to get this thing done (pretty bored of posting about it, really want to get back to making music with it) but didn’t quite get there. 3.5mm midi in and out tested and working! LEDs tested and working! All that’s left is to mount and wire the encoders. Not too hard, just a lot of wires.

Oh, then I have to program it to do something. ;)

(New phone this week pleeeease my camera is dying)

/344 - Here We Go (Again)

Another beautiful day. We took a long walk and played on the playground this morning, then finished up all my pre-winter chores (except getting the garage organized) this afternoon. This weekend was great, but it went by really fast!

Tonight I managed to cut another faceplate for moduloti and get so so much desoldering done so I can finally get this thing all the way together and working with the encoders and LEDs. I was really itching to patch a bit tonight, but getting this done and back in the rack will be worth it.

/343 - What a Day

Another beautiful (and choreful) day outside. Spent a little time this morning working out the design changes I need to get everything I need on moduloti under that 10hp plate. Still a bit of redrawing to do, then cut another plate, and wiring…

ON TOP OF THAT: Today the first day in 4 years that I haven’t been ashamed to be an American. Unity and respect, what an idea. ♥

/337 - Moving Ahead

Made more progress on the Moduloti board today. It turns out that whatever aluminum alloy was used for the panel material I have is too hard for my tiny endmills. Not to be undone, I grabbed some plastic laminate that I had and sort of matched the bare aluminum. This cut lots better (obviously) but I did have to cut a second because the hole positions put the axo board into the rail and the module wouldn’t fit.

Boards are cut and all the desoldering is done. It’s a tight fit and wiring this might not be very fun. but in the end this is going to be a really amazing tool for my case. I was hoping to have this ready by the time my modules arrive (tomorrow!) but hopefully I’ll get it wrapped up by next weekend at the latest.

/336 - Moduloti

Made some more progress on this today. Tested and confirmed being able to power it board off the modular power bus and that hacking on 3.5mm trs jacks works for midi I/O. I can use the encoder switching/control subpatch I’ve already made for my other Axo, so just need to work out a 3 or 4 midi LFO scheme. Hardware seems like it won’t be too bad, but I always seem to end up in trouble on something. haha

/335 - Something Useful

I have an extra Axoloti board here that I never had a plan for. I was thinking today about midi control for the bitbox, wishing I had a rackable host, etc, etc when I put it together that Axo could be this for me. It can’t handle modular levels of CV or Audio, but it can act as a midi device and/or a host and it runs on 12v. It will take some hacking and fabbing, but if I can make it all fit (I think I can, in 10hp) I’ll have a module which acts as a midi passthrough for my controllers and ipad or norns, but I can also program midi LFOs, envelopes, or sequencers, AS WELL AS a standalone audio device that I can plug my guitar into for looping or effects. Fingers crossed but this could be pretty cool.

/297 - Axoloti, A Tragedy in Four Acts

Oh tiniest resistor, a jumper, to be de and re-soldered. You give them each their name.

You wake, yet there is a duplicity — the connection is not properly made. One wonders why.

Oh tremulous heart, here you both stand properly before me!

Oh cursed fates, a crack is heard as you settle into place. One twin shall speak no more.

/scene.

/295 - A Good Project Day

The jazzmaster template is scaled correctly, which means the annodized aluminum panel I have is big enough to cut the guard from!

Ash’s marketplace skills paid off big time with this lot of 60 rolls of expired Kodak Max 400 — all for $10!. It’s not the most special film, but it should keep us set for snapshots for a very very long time.

I tried to desolder the oleds but they just wouldn’t budge and I didn’t want to destroy them. Decided it was easier to just cut a new board on the cnc and it turned out very nice. It’s really hard when the pitch is this small (for example, look how spacious that through-hole destined board is) but this works. I really need to work out a better process to get from layout (via DIYLC) to a file the machine can cut. Then I need to work out a better process for leveling and engraving. Always more to learn.

/290 - The Good and The Bad/Ugly

L: The platform feeder Emi and I are building is turning out great. It’s currently hanging to dry the last coat of finish and should be ready to mount on the pole and put up tomorrow. Probably time to start researching DIY squirrel baffles.

R: Took Axoloti apart this morning to try reflowing the connections on the weak oled screen. There was no improvement so I decided to change it out and managed to drop a bead of hot solder on the good screen. It still works, but there’s a divot in the glass and a distortion in the display. Once again I am reminded to SLOW DOWN. Sigh.

/288 - It's Sunday?

Spent the first half of today somehow thinking it was Saturday. What a harsh realization.

Had a first go at fixing the failing oled screen on my Axoloti. All I really did was reflow the board connections since that’s all I could get to without taking it all apart. No luck. Next step is dig in deeper and take it apart so I can check the header connections, and then replace it if that still doesn’t work. If it is broken then it’s my fault — when I was putting it all together originally a stray nut was under the screen when I tried to tighten it down so it flexed a bit. I don’t think it enjoyed that, but I’m honestly surprised it’s lasted this long.

Emi and I also got the building done on the platform bird feeder project. It’s glued and clamped, just needs some sanding and a finish before we can put it up. It’s turned out great so far.

/287 - Inching Towards Mobility

Took my mobile mess out to the table this afternoon for testing. Still working on the Axoloti patch (and it appears that my damaged oled screen might finally be giving out, making it very hard to troubleshoot the patch) but things worked well running the jazzmaster into the mini > norns (mlr) > axo synth and reverb > portable speakers. Tons of variables so it definitely needs more use, but once I started playing it was a lot of fun.

The video is a synth drone with guitar loops playing from mlr, and live guitar over the top with bonus bird sounds. It was a beautiful day so the windows were open and the chickadees were really enjoying themselves at the feeders. Wasn’t planning on recording so it was done with the iphone mic. Sounds pretty decent, considering.

/283 - Crunching, Compiling

Quick pic tonight — I spent all my time post-bedtime working out the kinks in this patch. I was able to optimize some things to let this thing actually compile. It’s been a real rollercoaster since my last post on this. I currently have a 4 voice (my bare minimum of workability — maybe I can squeak out another?) 2 osc synth with ADSR, and LP/HP filters. This is controlled by 12 parameters on pages 1-3. Page 4 is currently the master reverb which is fed by the synth and stereo inputs to be used with guitar, etc. Now that it’s actually working I need to play with it and I’m sure there will still be a lot of tweaks, but pretty happy that it works at all!

/280 - Jinx, As Expected

Well. I got the patch control scheme working perfectly — all pages and function switching, parameter display, proper midi ccs sending, everything. Then I tried to add my simple synth and reverb and it crashed and burned because I was using too much ram. I tried several iterations of refactoring to reduce load, but it was never enough. I can get 16 parameters working with the rest so I’m now working through ideas for maximum usability through select control. In the end it will probably be easier to manage, but it’s still a bummer. I took a little while and just played my guitar straight into my amp in protest.

/279 - Success!

Emi and I had a good day today. Hung around, played games, read books, and took a hike. I brought my camera and binoculars and that was heavy and I didn’t see any birds. Still, it was fun.

Axoloti: As it turns out, my modification to the encoder object was correct — I just capitalized something I shouldn’t have. Once that was fixed everything works as intended! Feels great to be able to work my way through a problem like that when I’m so out of my depth. Now I just have to patch it all up (Image shows the layout for 1 encoder out of 4 total) and hope it all works. ( I really shouldn’t jinx myself like this)

/278 - Tidbits

L: I was able to spend some time working on the Axo patch, but kept running into issues in my strategy. Accessing parameter pages is central to this patch and every time I switched it would make the last parameter jump in value. That’s no good. I came upon a solution which is solid, except for the fact that it requires modifying object code and I’m not a coder. I was able to make a little headway on my own, but am going to need some support. Hoping the axo forum folks feel inclined to chime in.

R: New portable speakers arrived today and they are much better than the last pair I had to send back. Those ones (Anker Soundcore 2) had unusable latency, even when using a wired connection instead of bluetooth. Unacceptable. So far these are pretty good but I need to spend some time with them to really know how they respond to different types of signals. It’s already apparent that I will need to add a para eq or high-pass filter to the axo patch take out some of the deep lows. These speakers sound much bigger than they are, but they definitely can’t handle too much bass.

/276 - Off The Cuff

I’ve been working on the new patch for my Axoloti scheme. Initially I was having issues with parameters jumping when I switched from one function to another. Still some things to work through, and a whole lot of connections to make/remake, but I think my new coding strategy is working. We’ll see how hard it crunches the cpu once everything is in there. Once I get the UI/control system working then I’ll start patching the synth, figuring out parameters, etc.

There isn’t much to show, and nothing running enough on the hardware to not be confusing, so I decided to make this totally impromptu demo of the drone patch which uses the encoders in the same way as it should work when the new patch is finished. 100% unplanned sounds and 100% thrown together video setup. It clips a bit at the end, but my phone was dying so take 2 wasn’t an option.

In case it’s hard to see/understand:

Top screen is page name and a scope of the audio output. Bottom screen has 4 parameter names and value display. (Bottom screen is harder to see because it got a little damaged during assembly and every other line on the display is dead. I wanted to fix it, but it reads just fine in person) Each encoder controls a parameter on the active page. Pushing the encoder switches between the 4 pages: OSC1, OSC2, OSC3, EFFECT, e.g. push encoder 1 go to page 1, and so on. Each osc page has a -11 to +11 pitch range around a common octave, lfo speed and depth, and volume. Effect page has filter cutoff and resonance, Reverb diffusion and mix. The buttons from left to right are: Common octave down, octave up, on/off. The leds display the rate of depth of the lfo for each oscillator. I specifically left the filter cutoff steppy in order to add another option for pseudo-melody. At higher resonance settings there are some great nodes to be found that ring out (hence the clipping) and really add to everything that’s going on.

I made this patch as a test to work out the hardware control scheme and then never changed it because I like it so much. There’s more in there than it would seem. Hope you enjoy.

/274 - A New Plan Forming

I was playing guitar this morning when a new idea started to come to me. I love the sound of the Alesis wedge so so much, but it runs on AC power so integrating it into this conceptual mobile setup I have been kicking around is impractical. As I laid on the floor listening it occurred to me that I already have the answer — Axoloti. There’s a reverb object which sounds amazing that would be the perfect stand-in. More than that it occurred to me that I could solve several problems at once: 1. amazing reverb; 2. a simple synth for live playing along with loops, or to be fed by a norns sequencer; and 3. a midi controller mapped to norns parameters.

I designed this hardware configuration a few years ago: 4 encoders with pushbutton, 2 oled screens capable of displaying 4 lines each, and 3 buttons with decoupled leds. The goal here was to allow for pagination via the buttons with oleds and leds for indicators/visual feedback. The demo patch I made (have been meaning to make a performance video of that for awhile now) has most of the core switching programming I need. I just need to remember how it works and then add functionality to allow it to flip between the functions noted above. I’m glad to be back into this — Axo was a huge step forward in idea-realization for me. Not to mention being able to actually code things (ish) from scratch.

/168 - Axo Drones

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Something reminded me of Stars of the Lid this morning, so I listened to the classic Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid while doing dishes, laundry, etc. Inspired by that and the upcoming drone day, tonight I pulled out my axoloti drone synth, ran it through Timeparty, and spaced out for awhile. The axo patch is a simple 3 oscillator setup, each with it’s own tuning and amp lfo, global filter and reverb. I patched it up as a test when I finished the hardware (what’s not simple is the 2 subpatches in the top left which handle all the encoder switching and screen controls) and liked it so much that I never changed it. I’m out of the habit of patching Axo, but I should get back into it. It’s usually a lot of fun and some great sounds come out of it.

Nice end to a long day of working in the garden. (though we didn’t get as much done as we had hoped to and it’s supposed to rain all week…)