Lessons In Mass Production From An Atari Punk Console

November 16, 2023 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Sometimes the most interesting part of a project isn’t the widget itself, but what it teaches you about the manufacturing process. The story of the manufacturing scale-up of this Atari Punk Console and the lessons learned along the way is a perfect example of this.

Now, don’t get us wrong — we love Atari Punk Consoles. Anything with a couple of 555s that bleeps and bloops is OK in our books. But as [Adam Gulyas] tells the tale, the point of this project was less about the circuit than about the process of making a small batch of something. The APC was low-hanging fruit in that regard, and after a quick round of breadboarding to decide on component values, it was off to production. [Adam] was shooting for 20 units, each in a nice enclosure and a classy package. PCB assemblies were ordered, as were off-the-shelf plastic enclosures, which ended up needing a lot of tweaking. [Adam] designed custom labels for the cases, itself a fraught job; glossy label stock and button bezels apparently don’t mix.

After slogging through the assembly process, boxing the units for shipping was the next job. [Adam] sourced jewelry boxes just a bit bigger than the finished APCs, and rather than settle for tissue paper or packing peanuts, designed an insert to hold the units snugly. That involved a lot of trial and error and a little bit of origami-fu, and the results are pretty nice. His cost per unit came out to just a hair over $20 Canadian, including the packaging, which is actually pretty remarkable for such a short production run.

[Adam] includes a list of improvements for larger-scale runs, including ordering assembled PCBs, outsourcing the printing processes, and getting custom boxes made so no insert is needed. Any way you cut it, this production run came out great and teaches us all some important lessons.

The Atari Punk Console, Now With More Vacuum Tubes

January 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Most of us have beheld the sonic glory of an Atari Punk Console, that lo-fi synth whose classic incarnation is a pair of 555 timers set up to warble and bleep in interesting ways. Very few of us, however, have likely seen an APC built from 555s that are made from vacuum tubes.

It’s little surprise to regular readers that this one comes to us by way of [David] at Usagi Electric, who hasn’t met a circuit that couldn’t be improved by realizing it in vacuum tubes. His “hollow-state” Atari Punk Console began with the 18-tube version of the 555 that he built just for fun a while back, which proved popular enough that he’s working on a kit version, the prototype of which served as the second timer for the synth. With 32 tubes aglow amid a rats-nest of jumpers, the console managed to make the requisites sounds, but lacked a certain elegance. [David] then vastly simplified the design, reducing the BOM to just four dual-triode tubes. Housed on a CNC milled PCB in a custom wood box, the synth does a respectable job and looks good doing it. The video below shows both versions in action, as well as detailing their construction.

As cool as a vacuum tube synth may be, we realize that not everyone goes for the hot glass approach. No worries — plenty of silicon Atari Punk Consoles to choose from here. There’s one built into a joystick, a circuit sculpture version complete with mini-CRT, or even eight APCs teamed up with MIDI control.

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Great Emergency Lights From Not-So-Great UPS

March 24, 2018 by Jenny List 25 Comments

We know your shame. Like you, we wanted to save some scratch and bought the bottom-of-the-range UPS, only to discover that it is no use to man or beast as it lacks the power to perform any reasonable task. It’s now sitting in a corner, to gather dust as its batteries deteriorate.

Not so fast with the UPS abandonment! [rue_mohr] came up with a modification for a small APC UPS that turned it into something a little more useful. Removing the mains inverter from the picture with a few displaced wires and PCB mod, the UPS is now a 12V battery with a mains charger and power outage detection built-in. In this state it’s the perfect power pack for some 12V LED strips used for emergency lighting. There is a handy 3D print that fits the rear socket cut-outs on the US version of the device and provides apertures for a pair of DC power jacks.

This is a relatively simple hack, but we like it for taking the focus away from the obvious part of the UPS, its mains inverter, and turning to the batteries as the main event. It’s a relatively tiny device, but in the past we’ve featured a UPS at the other end of the scale being used for power back-up to a whole house. Meanwhile we’d like to take a leaf from the [BOFH]’s book, and recommend that the most important piece of infrastructure requiring a UPS is the sysadmin’s coffee machine.

Modular 555 Synth Is Controlled By MIDI

February 7, 2015 by Adam Fabio 23 Comments

[Atdiy and Whisker] aka [The Tymkrs] have created a MIDI controlled 8 note modular synthesizer. (YouTube link). The project was designed to highlight some of the modules they have available at their Tindie Store. Essentially, the synthesizer is 8 classic Atari Punk Console (APC) tone generators. Each APC is made up of two 555 chips, rather than the 556 used in the original design. The APCs are tuned to a Pentatonic scale, with the 8 notes covering 1.5 octaves. [Whisker] added a single potentiometer which controls all 8 of the monostable oscillators at once. Tweaking this knob gives the synth that classic Atari Punk Console sound we’ve all come to know and love.

The 8 APC outputs are routed to once side of an AND gate. The other side of the AND gate is connected to a 74hc595 shift register. A Parallax Propeller processor converts MIDI note data into a serial stream that can be daisy chained across several ‘595 shift registers. The outputs of the 8 and gates are mixed to a single combined output, which goes out to [The Tymkrs] studio amplifier.

Like many [Tymkrs] videos, this one ends with a MIDI driven jam session, outlining how the circuit would sound in a song. Click past the break to see it all in action!

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Sucking PIC Firmware Out Of An Old APC Battery Backup

January 18, 2014 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

reverse-engineering-pic-firmware-of-APC-power-supply

Looking at this huge Uninterruptible Power Supply we are a little envious. It’s meant to hang on the wall of a utility room and power your critical devices. [Radek Hvizdos] has had it in service for quite some time, and when he started thinking of replacing the internal battery he decided to see if he could also extend the functionality. To do so he needed to get at the firmware of the chip controlling the device. And so began his adventure of dumping the firmware from the read-protected PIC 18F452.

The challenge of dumping code from a write-protected chip is in itself a fun project. But [Radek] was actually interested in fixing bugs and adding features. The wishlist feature we’d be most interested in is a kind of triage for shutting down devices as the internal battery starts to run low. Nice! But starting from scratch with the firmware is a no-go. You can see the two places where he connected to the PCB. The upper is for using a PIC programmer. The lower is an I2C connection used to dump the EEPROM with an improvised Bus Pirate.

In the end it was improper lock bit settings that opened the door to grabbing the firmware. The bootloader section of the PIC is not locked, and neither is the ability to read from FLASH at run-time. These two combined allowed him to write his own code which, when flashed to the bootloader section, dumps the rest of the firmware so that it may be combined into a complete file afterward. Since posting this fascinating article he has made a follow-up about disassembling the code.

A Linux Server That Tweets Power Changes

August 22, 2009 by Matt Schulz 21 Comments

Twitter has been used for lots of experiments, both useful and just for fun. [FIRESTORM_v1] sent in his project that falls under the useful category. When he wanted a way to monitor his server’s power statistics, Twitter was a logical choice. Similar to the Tweet-a-Watt, he wrote a script that posts messages from APCUPSd to a Twitter account that he follows, and gets the updates on his phone. [FIRESTORM_v1] documents all of the scripts he used and the steps to get your server up and tweeting.