Radio playing

Lifes been a bit hectic of late but managed to get one little thing done this week which was use one of these very cheap (6quid delivered from shenzen) dab/freeview dongles and get it setup with alternate drivers so it becomes a software defined radio. I got it working with SDR# following these instructions  here . I also worked out how to get it to send audio to another piece of software called  fldigi which is a software modem capable of decoding audio from a radio meaning if I get a decent homebrew antenna built I should be able to decode satellite telemetry....so far for less than a tenner! Also got my test for my foundation licence next week...gotta do a bit of reading!

Spotting Strand1

I was out for a wintery walk the other evening and was playing with the great free satellite tracking app "satelliteAR" when I spotted Strand1 on amongst the mix. I am a fan of Strand1 as it is a british cubesat and has put the first android phone in space. It also has some fantastic experimental propulsion systems on it. Hopefully I'll get my radio knowledge together to listen and maybe decode telemetry to Strand1 before it's orbit decays.

Kodak ki8 and Zoom H1

I've had my zoom H1 for a while now and I love it dearly...yes the case is a bit plasticky and creaky but it records at great sample/bit rates, the inbuilt xy mics sound great and the external mic preamps aren't too bad at all. Recently I picked up a second hand kodak KI8 camera...these are pretty cool...they shoot HD 1080, but also 720p at either 30fps or 60fps...now my phone can do most of that but what is brilliant about the KI8 (and missing from so many other camcorders) is it has an external mic/line input with adjustable gain. This means 2 things I can shoot clips and run audio into the camera through a better mic...but also could run a combination of signals through a mixer into the input...meaning when I do my videos showing new creations I can chat to a mic but then get much better line in recordings of the device I'm demoing. Yay. In celebration I just did a 10 minute hack job and made a quick mount for both the zi8 and the h1...I'll make a better one at some point but its good enough for now.

Getting my process sorted

Got a bit more time yesterday to build a couple more mixers based of the PCB I made. I am definitely a convert to PCB making as although it takes a good while to make, etch and drill the PCB's when they are done it takes no time at all to assemble them with the components. I've redesigned the board for these to accept phono sockets so after xmas I'll make some of these and possibly try and sell some...I am designing a larger more unusual mixer (more details soon) which is my main idea at the moment.

The Missing link...diy usb otg

I've been playing with some old nokia tablets (thats right not phones!) I've recently picked up a nokia n800 and an n810 for the retro handheld collection...(I think I need a display cabinet soon...) The n810 is great and actually has many uses for me day to day. I've been away this week and its made a good hotel wifi browser, great note taker  document tweaker with its nice hardware thumboard, and a useful link/transfer device when I needed to get some large audio files off my zoom recorders sd card and into my phone for a bit of on the fly editing. As a transfer device the n810 is very useful as it has 2gig of built in storage as well as an sd card slot....sort of....its a MINI sd slot (not micro) and amazingly I had a micro sd to mini sd adapter from an old phone. This means you can drag stuff off a card and back onto another card although I just did some big bluetooth transfers.

Anyway I was aware that with a USB on the go (otg) cable you can actually connect stuff to the 810 with the 810 acting as host...I hacked together a cable today and got this working (albeit a bit limited) it seems to only work for pendrives but for me thats really useful. I've been playing with powering usb hubs to try and get harddrives running to it but no luck as yet!

To make a USB otg cable you basically have to cut 2 cables in half one that has the micro b connection for the 810 and one that has a femal usb socket. Each cable end should have 4 wires, red, black, green and white and also a bare wire earth sleave wrapped round the other wires. Firstly you have to connect these wire to each other matching the colours and also connecting the earth wire. Then the slightly tricky bit is that the micro b end needs to be opened up (I carved the plastic back off the connector carefully using a razorblade). Once you have exposed the connections to the micro b socket you should discover you have one pin that is unconnected. (this is pin 4 and a lot of tutorials on making these just say to connect "pin 4" to earth...I think it easier to just find the only unconnected pin as it is ALWAYS pin 4 that is unconnected). So then with all the connections visible you want to solder a small wire to the unconnected pin and the other end to the edge of the metal socket housing therefore connecting pin 4 to earth. MAKE SURE that you now only use this for usb otg type operations as when you connect this cable it will want to put the device into host mode.

Anyway, I'll continue to tinker with the n810 and any more useful stuff will be posted.

Uh oh, another project

It's always a mistake when I go round to the local bike co-op! BSA "Tour De France" frame chucked in as a freebie for buying some decent second hand bikes for the kids. It's too mountainous where I live for a hipster fixie build.....but I do have some nice light alloy wheels with a sturmey archer 3 speed.....so hipster hub gear build it is!

Quick Raspberry Pi case

Needed a quick case for my raspberry pi. I found an old sony dv tape box that's internal dimensions matched the length of a pi with the sd card inserted. I don't plan to switch out the sd card that much as the os is running from it so it's not important for me to have access to it. Currently I have nothing that utilises the hdmi either so for now that has no access although I could cut this in at some point. The only issue with this case is that the micro usb socket used for power is recessed from its access hole by a cm or so making it a bit of a fiddle to connect a usb lead to. I may get round this by making a short power cable that I can leave plugged into the pi held in with a gromit (or hot glue) on the case (not the rpi itself!)

Jornada 720 online (finally)

Ages ago when I first picked up my beloved jornada 720 I looked into getting it online...the jornada came with an inbuilt dialup modem but had no built in wireless connection or bluetooth. I picked up a compatible PCMCIA wireless card from ebay. The card is a Cisco Aironet 340 and has the ability to throw data about at a mindblowing 11mbps! Anyway I realised as soon as I tried it that it couldn't cope with "modern" wifi encryption like WPA or WEP...so I never really did any more. I came across this card at the back of a draw and thought I'd have a play as I realised if I set my HTC phone as a wifi hotspot it uses no encryption/security. It worked really well..in fact all I did was turn the htc hotspot on and put the PCMCIA card in the slot and when I launched internet explorer on the jornada it had already connected!

Now I can't say I'm going to do extensive browsing on the jornada but it's very handy to be able to email stuff of the jornada to myself...like sunvox project files for example. Who knows I might get into retro wardriving mid nineties style!

My "custom" Hofner shorty

I've just dug out my old faithful Hofner Shorty travel guitar as I'm going away for a few days. I love this guitar as its been on some adventures with me over the years and is the guitar I've travelled with most, its been on planes, atop mountains, on boats, strapped to bikes and backpacks, been in the snow...the list goes on. Last year I accidentally killed this guitar, I like to play with heavy gauge flatwound strings and as an experiment I tried a set of 15's on it and the tension became too much for the original bridge posts and they got pulled out of the body....whatever I did I couldn't get the bridge posts to bind back into the body holes and whenever I restrung it it would pull them out. So in the end the solution was to buy a fender style bridge with the holes on the back of the bridge designed for through body string mounting...however I had to build up a small wooden block to bring the bridge to the correct height...took ages to get everything levelled up and getting the new bridge to mount centrally. Whilst I was at it i thought I'd fit this signature "Atilla Zoller" pickup as I wanted a more neck pickup sound than the humbucker that is in its original mount at the rear of the body. I had to dremel a groove under the scratchplate to fit the cable for the neck pickup but it's well worth it as the floating pickup sounds great. Currently the bridge pickup isn't wired up but I think at some point I'll wire it to another output so I can do dual output/effects chain recordings.

Anyway she aint pretty....but she's one of my favourites for sure...I reckon the pickup is worth about twice as much as the guitar and bizarrely the strap I always use on this guitar I bought at a fundraising auction for a music charity and it used to belong to Mundell Lowe, the great (90 odd year old) jazz guitarist who played with em all, mingus, parker, etc etc

Friday night breadboard

Just a quick post as I'm deep in the throws of breadboarding and patching ideas together to see what I'm going to build into the origami synth.

Last meeting at warm data

Just finalising a few things before the big upload session and release tomorrow....aaaah the end is in sight.

Sunvox on my droid

Awesome, Sunvox is ported to android and is on the app store, running beautifully on my htc desire s. Today is a good day.

Album tracks finished Artwork on the way.

Aaaaah indeed, I have finished mixing the album and the artwork is in the pipeline. Then hand it to the labelboss who will curate and describe and release......can't wait.....not long now....

A piece of history

Couldn't resist this charity shop find yesterday a lovely wooden framed 150 in 1 electronics projects board in perfect order. A little bit of googling around shows this one dates from the year I was born 1976. It has the book of experiments/projects with it which includes lots of noise making/oscillator projects......maybe I can get an ep out of this beauty!

A silly project...mini lathe chuck

I've just got back my mig welder which had been on a rather long term loan and once setup in my shed I wanted a little job to do to test it and my auto darkening mask (20 quid off ebay). So I made up this little chuck from a washer and some tiny mechano nuts. I have a job in mind in that eventually I'd like to  setup my dremel as a mini lathe and turn some tiny knobs to fit some trim pots I am going to use in a future synth build. Not the easiest job as the mig is not really the best bit of kit for this, brazing would have been much neater and easier...haven't got brazing gear though!

Still cooking up the album

This frying pan seems to feature on most tracks....

Late night sampling

Had a late night sampling session returning to one of my earliest circuit bent creations my yamaha pss6. Sounds great, I am always shocked by the quality of the stock sounds on this let alone the glitchy madness.

O silly scope

An amazing man rocked up to my house tonight and long term loaned me this beautiful old valvy oscilloscope and a function generator....nice.

Nice lunch break

I do enjoy nanolooping in castles! Nanoloop 2.2 is currently providing a bit of inspiration for the final quarter of my album which I hope to finish in the next couple of months.

Low noise of late

Just picked up this lovely old decibel gauge...although i'm not that into steampunk I am a sucker for an old gauge. It also indicates my output of late....zero.... Actually I have been working on a few tracks but they are hopefully for an album release later this year so I am not sharing them yet. A lot of my studio corner (my pile of stuff- studio is overselling it a bit!) Is also going into storage as I build an attic over a large room we have....this means not having a place to play and also having a LOT of diy to do. At the end of it all however I should have a very small triangular attic space all of my very own...yay.