Steve Cooley Fine Art

Welp, I decided on which CNC rig to go with. I wanted to keep my options open for the future, so I decided to go with a bigger rig than I had originally planned on committing to. I decided that I could commit several continuous days in a row to assembly, setting up a major section of my garage, and purchasing a couple-few extra things to accommodate the buildyourcnc.com Blacktoe 2×4.

Here’s the timelapse of the build:

Here’s the first run:

And here’s the first real job I ran with it:

Woohoo! Very happy!

Hey, so I’ve been super busy with lots of cool stuff. I’m working on the Beatseqr project, and I’m also putting that to work with my band Haptic Synapses. And along with those projects, I’ve been building some interesting tools with Max/MSP. Here’s one that I’m calling “sCCweet!” and in this particular instance, I’ve tuned it to work on Reason’s Malström synth. (You can either say that as “skweet” or “schweet” depending on which kind of person you are.)

click through to see the quicktime movie with audio

So… why? Well, a lot of modern soft synths have a randomizer function, but Propellerhead doesn’t follow market trends. They try to influence them.. sometimes to a good affect, and sometimes to the effect of going in the wrong direction of the rest of us. Reason has some really awesome sounding synths, it’s just kind of… funky… about a lot of stuff. So you can either choose to accept the Reason reality as a foregone conclusion, or make your own reality. I prefer to make my own. Anyone interested in getting a copy of the max patch that does this? It’s not limited to working with Reason, it can work with anything that uses midi CC messages. Leave a comment!

While making my Beatseqr project, I’ve been trying to find a reliable source for some faders / sliders / slide pots / slide action potentiometers, and I’ve been having a challenging time finding exactly what I want. So I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. Click on through to get a crazy large dose of science. Continue reading ‘HOWTO find and buy faders / sliders / slide pots / slide potentiometers’ »

Update: I’ve written a huge post on how to buy sliders/faders/slide potentiometers

As copiously stated, I have no formal training in electronics, and I’ve reached a mature enough age that I can no longer accept an electronic component as a black box, so when I come across a device and can figure out how to use it without being able to locate instructions, i feel like it’s only right to make a drawing of it and try to explain my hypothesis for how it works.

With that being said, here’s my best guess at how the 10k slide potentiometers (sliders / slide pot) works:

the 3 pin slide potentiometer (10k)

The obvious control at the top sets the resistance. The voltage in (V+) and ground (V-) pins run inline with each other, and the resistance value is read from the pin adjacent to the voltage in pin. I’m using an Arduino to read the value, and in my case, i actually needed an additional resistor in front of the voltage in pin to limit the incoming current. When i hooked the slider up directly to the arduino, it didn’t work very well, acting way more like it was a logarithmic curve potentiometer than the linear curve pot I thought it was. About 2 minutes later, it was blistering hot. Too hot to touch, actually! So, I quickly disconnected it from the arduino and added a 10k resistor in front of the voltage in, and then it started behaving much more reasonably. The values I was getting from the 10k slider were not what I was expecting, so I’ll have to dial back on the current resistor from 10k to maybe 1k and see if that helps get the values from the slide pot more inline with my expectations.

Derek and I have been working hard on building some useful tools for beat sequencing using Rosco and Max/MSP. Poking around at Max/MSP made me realize how much I understand PureData, so I went back to PD and built a comprehensive “data-in” patch to receive the OSC messages from Rosco.

Download the Rosco PD patch

Click to preview what this patch does

Download the Rosco PD patch

Hey there, I’ve created a page for Rosco since I’ve revised it to version 2.0.

Rosco is an app that I’m working on that creates Open Sound Control (OSC) messages.  It can generate them with or without taking data readings from an Arduino.  Version 1 only had 6 sliders (one for each analog pin from the arduino), but now the new version includes being able to use 12 checkboxes (which correlate to pins 2-13 on an arduino).  I’ve revved the app, the quartz composer file, and the arduino code to all show examples how to get it going. Check it out!

http://www.sc-fa.com/blog/rosco/

Hey, come check out my arduino project box that I’m working on! That’s what the post about the SPDT switches was all about.

Here’s a video I made of some of the construction steps:

arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

I’m working on my arduino project box, specifically the wiring. I ran into a really strange problem with the blue Single-pole-dual-throw (SPDT) switches I had selected for my digital i/o pins. Strange to me until I thought about it, and then I realized how not-strange it is

The problem is that all of my toggle switches were working backwards to my expectations. (If you’re reading this and have already learned this lesson, you know where we’re going. )

Here’s a photo of the switches I’m using (thanks to banzaieffects for having a really nice photo of this component online)

Miyama is the manufacturer…   Anyway! Here’s the deal:

I wired things up to what I thought would be a logical way. Wire this to that, just like the slide switches I’d also been using without incident.

Then I had my epiphany about how these toggle switches work. I tried to imagine cutting one in half to visualize how they worked based on the scientific research that had been forced on me. My slide switches work great, but my toggle switches are all working backwards.

Aha, so based on what would now make a lot of sense, if I wanted to have my switches indicate directionality on my panel, I would need to switch how they’re wired on the back of the panel in order to emulate the behavior I want!

And now, look at that. Switching the wires will in fact give me the results I had originally intended, even though it seems like a trick I have to pull on my brain in order to get it to do what I want. Not really, but.. without being able to actually see inside the switch, visually it looks like the opposite of what made sense.

Sooo… yeah, now I have a lot of clean up work to do on my project. Recut and strip a bunch of wires, desolder and remove a bunch of work I’ve already done… sigh… Oh well. Such is the price of Doing It Yourself. my hard lesson learned will hopefully translate into less of a mystery for you.

Technorati Tags: arduino, componentry, design, DIY, diy, electronic, howto, panel, programming, wiring

here’s a sneak peek at a font I hope to release later this year. it’s a block letter wildstyle. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of typeface for a long time, and fontstruct seems to be one way to get it done. It’s a little stiffer than I’d prefer it be, but I’ll see it through and maybe take another stab at it later in life.

Technorati Tags: fonts, fontstruct

My brother in law Justin is working on a short film. I just got the green light to post it, so here it is.

Eden (4th pass rough cut) from Justin Kane on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: justinkane