Category Archives: diy

Filter Sweep with your Mouth

By dan on 19 September 2009 under diy

Educational and funny, the only way to do it.

Hardware Hacking Final Project

By dan on 27 January 2009 under diy, sound


from dan schreck on Vimeo.

Homemade instrument. Our last day of class we all played the electronic instruments that we built, it was awesome. The voice is from a hacked am/fm radio with additional gating circuit and frequency scrambling added.

Digital Control: Microsystems

By dan on 13 January 2009 under diy

img_1304_microsystems

Here is a “multimedia” control interface. Don’t let the cigar box housing fool you. What you can’t see in the picture is a USB cable running out the back that hooks up to a computer.

The controller was designed specifically for a Max/MSP patch called “Decision Maker” — a random loop generator/player that I made. The patch runs fine on it’s own but it can also be played, tweaked, and guided. That’s where the controller comes in.

Usually, store-bought controllers are of the “fit for any occasion” type, whether it is a bank of 64 pots or 16 pressure sensors. There is a ghostly quality to them. The thing that DIY controllers have going for them is not their ability to mimic the already available one size fits all, it is their ability to snugly fit one size.

Project Specs

  • 5 analog pots
  • 2 momentary switches
  • 2 toggle switches
  • atmega168 microchip
  • FTDI cable

built for Microsystems.

Back-up Strategy

By dan on 27 December 2008 under diy

I still manually back-up my digital work. We’ll see how long that lasts. There are plenty of noteworthy programs out there that I hear do a great job of doing this automatically. 

So let’s take a look. The goal is to have two versions of everything that is still being worked on. One version is on an internal drive and the other is somewhere else (like an external HD or a different computer). Once projects are finished, or finished for the time being, they are back up to DVD.

Each DVD is marked by a number and has a brief description which is filed away into a warm case.

On my computer, there is one master document that lists the back-up DVDs by number and everything that is on them. The trick here is listing every filename and folder name that is on the DVD, printing the file structure. Then the back-ups can be searched like things are searched for when they are still on the computer.

Printing the file structure for a DVD or any other folder is simple. Using the Terminal program in Mac OS X, navigate to the base folder that you are interested in and type: ls -GR1

G: colorizes output, R: Recursively lists subdirectories, 1: Forces every entry to be one line.

The system reinforces good file naming and folder hierarchy from start to finish. Anybody else have a back-up strategy they’d like to share? Anybody that uses Time Machine want to chime in?

Portable Audio Recorder Crochet Cozy

By dan on 27 November 2008 under diy

I’ve been looking for a nice case for my portable recorder for some time now. The recorder was a big investment and buying those extra couple of things like stand and case seemed like overkill. There was also a bit of a delay between when the recorder was released and when a case for it became available. Meanwhile my recorder lay dormant in the box that it came in, too fragile to go out, too fragile to be portable.

The solution was making a crochet cozy for the recorder, of which I have found there is an entire movement. A good example of a cozy is this one for a paper coffee cup here (in place of the single-use cardboard ones). There is also a lot of people doing crochet cozies in the street, with slip covers for fire hydrants, street signs, and door handles. Learn how to crochet here.