After some major drama in the workshop (leakages, iron dust cloud, broken floor, rainwater coming in, etc) I finally have some time to share a few progress pictures. First and foremost: IT WORKS! The Goldfish R4 UI board can be used as a stand alone USB-MIDI controller! I had to Read more
Festival season is here! And since we like glowsticks, but don’t like their nonrecyclable nature – we decided to go all out on a bunch of LED toys! Behold: Each smiley features 20 LEDs in a Charlieplexed setup running on an Atmel Attiny85. The smiley PCBs were done by DirtyPCBs.com. They arrived Read more
The Goldfish v4 user-interface board has been ordered! The new big protoboards too! A batch of tiny protoboards too! And a set of LED badges for the summer festivals where we shall be jumping around! Goldfish v4 UI board: Festival LED badge: Small Protoboard: Large protoboard:
The UI board for the Goldfish v4 is almost ready for production (post will follow soon) – so the search for fancy factories has begun! I was quite charmed by the colours of this fish: (found here: http://www.andreaharner.com/archives/2007/11/sos_goldfish_na.html) Which led me to search for circuitboards with white soldermasks and red Read more
While searching for some easy-to-add USB options for the new Goldfish development, I revisisted the V-USB package. This package allows you to add USB to any small microcontroller that can add an interrupt to a pinchange. Link: http://vusb.wikidot.com/ While digging through earlier projects using this library, I found this amazing Read more
The FPGA-based Goldfish is still in constant flux. I decided it needed more encoders on the frontpanel, AND some visual feedback for the value of each of the encoders. Each encoder now has 16 LEDs around it to show the current value/meaning. Apparently there are some suppliers that build complete Read more
After playing with the FPGA boards for a while, I decided to completely overhaul the Goldfish board. Spending a bit more time and money will make this box much more useful for the coming years of audiovisual experiments! The current preliminary hardware feature set: Spartan 6 LX9 FPGA Freescale MK20 Read more
This Is Not Rocket Science is all about sharing the knowledge on how to make things. We have quietly been working on our first guide (which might grow in to a full book or wiki eventually) It is still very much a work in progress – but usable nonetheless. Here Read more
The happy Australian is at it again! This time, he talks about designing boards with FPGAs and explains various things about using tiny BGA (ball grid array) chips. These 3x3mm FPGAs have 36 connector-balls underneath, spaced only 0.4mm apart. Making circuit boards for these chips is still a bit too Read more
Krzysztof Foltman writes: “Another PCB sent to manufacturing. This time, it’s a universal 5x5cm protoboard. If you’re a beginner at electronics and want to try making a simple electronic circuit using standard through-the-hole components, it’s probably going to save you a lot of time. It’s compatible with DIL chips but also Read more