digital chaos 2; electric boogaloo

Made a cover for the PCB board out of thin pvc plastic from a StewMac. It was ridiculously difficult to get the template to the right size from the pdf's off of critter. But after a couple tries it was pretty close.

Cut up a bic pen for spacers between the pcb and cover plate. I may end up painting the cover but we'll see. For now, fabricating buttons....so tedious.

digital chaos

Soldering more or less complete on the pocket synth board. Arduino programming was pretty straight forward....its a neat little synth.

pocket synth madness

Picked up the Arduino Pocket Synth kit and Arduino Duemilanove for a fun side project in electronics. Also playing around with some 555 Timers and 741opamps to see how I can work some on board FX onto the synth....not to mention programming some different Arduino piano sketches.

So, if you're like me and have little to no electrical engineering experience, you need some kind of primer on circuitry and electronics in general. My own experience comes from wiring electronics for guitars and basses, and limited to pickups and pots. I've found some pretty helpful sites to get started:

= Tangentsoft is the best intro to electronics I have found so far, with comprehensive video tutorials. This guy is a pro, and the ground up approach has been useful in filling in some of the big gaps in knowledge.

=If you wanna get your learn on more formally, and get some free education, you can view a virtual cornucopia of classes from MIT, with homework and lab work.

= Schematic Symbol List was pretty helpful in deciphering complex circuit schematics.

= Here, here, here, here, here are long lists of schematics of mostly amps, FX boxes and other random audio circuits.