Thursday, May 26, 2011

Invisible instrument - simplified

As part of the Brighton Fringe (and partly why there's been little blog activity of late) the BuildBrighton group are hosting a daytime workshop followed by an evening gig filled with 8-bit bleeps and electronic music.

I've made a simplified version of the invisible instrument - removed the character LCD and buttons and LEDs, so it's just a voltage divider going into a microcontroller. The idea is to have up to twenty people making their own (from kits) at the workshop, then having a go playing them together! So I've been busy etching PCBs all afternoon.

Here's a shot of what 20 home-made invisible instrument PCBs look like:



They still need drilling (28 pin mcu + 4x2 legs on LDRs + 4x3 legs on potentiometers + crystal + cap + vias) over 50 holes per board. I think that's a job for the power tools at the Skiff this evening.

Now with just a few hours left, I need to write some simplified firmware (with the new pin input mapping) and software for the PC to make it play tunes...

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