Hackaday Links: September 17, 2017

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BREAKING NEWS: APPLE HAS RELEASED A NEW RECTANGLE. IT IS BETTER THAN THE PREVIOUS RECTANGLE, WHICH WAS A LESSER RECTANGLE. SOME PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE NEW RECTANGLE BECAUSE OF [[CHANGES]]. THE NEW RECTANGLE HAS ANIMATED POO.

Mergers and acquisitions? Not this time. Lattice Semiconductor would have been bought by Canyon Bridge — a private equity firm backed by the Chinese government — for $1.3B. This deal was shut down by the US government because of national security concerns.

[Jan] is the Internet’s expert in doing synths on single chips, and now he has something pretty cool. It’s a breadboard synth with MIDI and CV input. Basically, what we’re looking at is [Jan]’s CVS-01 chip for a DCO, DCF, and DCA), a KL5 chip for an LFO, and an envelope chip. Tie everything together with a two-octave captouch keyboard, and you have a complete synthesizer on a breadboard.

As an aside relating to the above, does anyone know what the cool kids are using for a CV/Gate keyboard controller these days? Modular synths are making a comeback, but it looks like everyone is running a MIDI keyboard into a MIDI-CV converter. It seems like there should be a –simple, cheap– controller with quarter-inch jacks labeled CV and Gate. Any suggestions?

World leaders are tweeting. The Canadian PM is awesome and likes Dark Castle.

Way back in July, Square, the ‘POS terminal on an iPad’ company posted some data on Twitter. Apparently, fidget spinner sales peaked during the last week of May, and were declining through the first few weeks of summer. Is this proof the fidget spinner fad was dead by August? I have an alternate hypothesis: fidget spinner sales are tied to middle schoolers, and sales started dropping at the beginning of summer vacation. We need more data, so if some of you could retweet this, that would be awesome.

Remember [Peter Sripol], the guy building an ultralight in his basement? This is going to be a five- or six-part video build log, and part three came out this week. This video features the installation of the control surfaces, the application of turnbuckles, and hardware that is far too expensive for what it actually is.

51 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: September 17, 2017

  1. Animated poo? Cut and paste error?

    BREAKING NEWS: APPLE HAS RELEASED A NEW RECTANGLE. IT IS BETTER THAN THE PREVIOUS RECTANGLE, WHICH WAS A LESSER RECTANGLE. SOME PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE NEW RECTANGLE BECAUSE OF [[CHANGES]]. THE NEW RECTANGLE HAS ANIMATED POO.

      1. All these things are already made by the Chinese though aren’t they? And likely developed by Chinese students in US universities come to think of it.

        Perhaps they should focus on countries like Turkey and Saudi-Arabia and Bahrain and Qatar etcetera etctera not getting nukes right about now instead. Because I bet a good sum on that all of them are working on it, or worse – secretively already made one.

        1. But in times of war you just take the opponent’s factories in your own country, and the patents. I expect.
          I wonder if there are modern rules for that, when what how much how long andsoforth

        2. I’m not sure about rules, but part of the issue is a foreign entity owning an American company or manufacturing base also has access to intellectual property, unless that property is specifically labeled as classified, but it would be difficult to control access to that IP. And if a foreign entity owns a company or manufacturing base, some US government projects are instantly out of bounds for that foreign entity due to classification restrictions.

    1. I hope Lattice Semi is OK. I *love* their iCE40 HX8K evaluation board along with the IceStorm tools, and the fact they sell hardware to normal people that don’t want to buy 10,000 at once.

      1. Why do you keel posting his stuff here? He insults you personally, he insults most people who comment on HaD posts linking to his work, muff wiggler and other forums dedicated to synths are full of tales of woe regarding disappointed customers.

          1. Just think about those who carefully cultivated and documented their grudges from when the internet was young, they must be running their killfiles on multi petabyte RAID arrays by now.

  2. Mr Benchoff, with all due respect, shouting on the Internet is not a nice/cool/etc thing. Please set your keyboard to its /indoor/ voice setting… you can do that by repeatedly beating your CapsLock key until the corresponding indicator lamp turns off…

    ;)

    1. Before it was shouting it was speaking in Apple ][ because lower case didn’t….. wellll… let’s just say with the 0.7 effective dot pitch your spare 5 year old black and white TV was capable of, you needed all the help reading it you could get, it needed to yell through the terribad focus.

      1. I learned to use computers on an ASR-33 Teletype and dammit, the Ctrl key belongs next to the A! That’s where God intended it to be and the fact that the Caps Lock key is there now is all IBM’s fault, because they thought personal computers were just fancy typewriters.

        I’ve been remapping keys since 1985.

          1. You can still use those keyboards if you know how to flash a Teensy, which I assume you do since you’re posting on Hackaday. They’re not horribly expensive, and they’re incredibly well made.

          2. I’ve got a clone somewhere with an XT-AT switch on the bottom and a 5 pin DIN to PS/2 and a PS/2 to USB active (Not just a pin changer for KB MCUs that supported 2 protocol.) So I could if I wanted.

          3. Yah the 101 enhanced, but that was after taking a lot of flak from users wanting this and that moved, so partially response to that.

            However, on mechanical typewriters it was a latch operating on the left shift key so was immediately above left shift, so that was traditional position.

          4. Good question on the function keys.

            Another thing that’s interesting (I mentioned this before) is that officially you can have 24 of them, and windows for instance happily supports it natively, but I’ve NEVER seen more than 12 on anything. And if a keyboard has extra keys that can be assigned arbitrarily they use a special driver to map them to things like ‘G1’ and ‘L1’ and such.

            You really have to go your own way for your own keyboard eh.

    1. Last I heard they said they new CPU was more power efficient.
      And it’s apple, they don’t mind throwing money at things to not have them burst into flames.
      Although.. you are still reliant on 3rd party suppliers I suppose, and even reliable ones nowadays suddenly drop the ball on occasion. But at least Apple will have protective circuitry and sensors to shut things down.

  3. Ultralight in basement

    Is it just me, or are those turnbuckle ends the wrong type, going to cut into the av cable?

    But then there used to be an ultralight that used drapery cord and related hardware from Sears for their control lines…
    Fun to watch them in variable wind, with the pilot working the controls like people driving cars in the old movies: constantly turning the steering wheel back and forth.

    1. The turnbuckles are fine. The fact he doesn’t use wire thimbles (reinforcement in the eye/loop) of the wire is concerning. The overal method of construction leads me to believe he hasn’t even bothered getting at least some information on aviation best-practice guidelines in construction. The way the seatbelts are attached is also terribad.

  4. And I’m not seeing how he assembled his joy-stick joints/bearings. As in, something to prevent Al on Al wear and Al on bolt wear. And I’m concerned about the stick breaking at the joint under the leveraged control forces when you’re thrown around in the wind.

  5. All these comments, and not one has mentioned the unmatched ) in “Basically, what we’re looking at is [Jan]’s CVS-01 chip for a DCO, DCF, and DCA)”.

    I errored at that, and couldn’t read the rest of the article.

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