Devblog FenixIV in intelligent lockdown
How are you doing?
Most of us are in lockdown – intelligent or otherwise. Working from home and washing our hands again and again. Packing our disinfectants and facemasks when we venture outside to not embrace our friends and family. All in the hope that this global pandemic may pass us by…
While we pray for the odds to be forever in our favour, we can at least stay home and make beep!
One corona effect was that Superbooth could not happen in real-life so many people jumped online and made the Superbooth Home Edition together. We presented our second FenixIV prototype with the help of Sonic State and Synth Anatomy, we joined the Hainbach whiskey stream and discussed live in general with Molten Music Technology >> please check out the videos on our playlist .
In the middle of this we also happened to be on Podular Modcast with the lovely Tim. That ‘ll do…
More important is that in between everything – work on the FenixIV continues.
We have received and have ordered more parts (think cubic meters of jacks, pots, led buttons and switches) and have a new tentative planning. We are building new storage downstairs to make space for the reign of the Fenix that is to come. We are still in the process of working out a few things with our case metal workers and our aluminium printers and yesterday we ordered what we hope will be the final set of Fenix insides.
We’ve undertaken a noise exorcism. There was a fair amount of noise coming through the master mixer and interference between modules, most of this turned out be due to the inadequate power supply. We changed the power supply as technology has progressed and now offers better choices than when we started. We’ve moved the output and input stages of the master mixer (inside only) so that they are closer to their power and IO board. This limits the amount of 1.6V cable going through the system. We further optimized some logistics on the boards, adding a capacitor here or there until there was silence.
All digital modules have been optimized for calibration, meaning we built-in hardware margins for voltage input ranges. Our digital filter had a big soft- and hardware update. Now it has better stability when both high-pass and low-pass resonances are at a maximum and the high-pass can go deeper to provide some bass boost. We also added audio headroom for the digital filter to have analog clipping on the high resonant peaks. We’ve also developed a new wavetable mode to the digital oscillator so now you can import layered samples (Hurray Amen break!).
We’ve been crossing Ts and putting knobs in their correct place. We added 3 more LEDs to indicate activity on the input module and re-calibrated LED brightness throughout. We added more anti vibration lock screws.
Stijn has also been working a lot on ‘the big red button’ which pulls all the relevant design documents together – does a bunch of operations, like creating manufacturing frames to keep the jacks and pots straight in production – and bakes a set we can send to our factory. He has also built a high dpi export tool in order to stare at the boards in a different context, which helped to find a lot of small things to improve.
Now we wait for the boards to arrive so we can solder on the remaining parts and test our Fenix. Fingers crossed….
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