Logic Noise: Sawing Away With Analog Waveforms

March 9, 2015 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

Today we’ll take a journey into less noisy noise, and leave behind the comfortable digital world that we’ve been living in. The payoff? Smoother sounds, because today we start our trip into analog.

If you remember back to our first session when I was explaining how the basic oscillator loads and unloads a capacitor, triggering the output high or low when it crosses two different thresholds. At the time, we pointed out that there was a triangle waveform being generated, but that you’d have a hard time amplifying it without buffering. Today we buffer, and get that triangle wave out to our amplifiers.

But as long as we’re amplifying, we might as well overdrive the amps and head off to the land of distortion. We’ll do just that and build up a triangle-wave oscillator that can morph into a square wave, passing through a rounded-over kinda square wave along the way. The triangle sounds nice and mellow, and the square wave sounds bright and noisy. (You should be used to them by now…) And we get everything in between.

And while we’re at it, we might as well turn the triangle wave into a sawtooth for that nice buzzy-bass sound. Then we can turn the fat sawtooth into a much brighter sounding pulse wave, a near cousin of the square wave above.

What’s making all this work for us? Some dead-boring amplification with negative feedback, and the (mis-)use of a logic chip to get it. After the break I’ll introduce our Chip of the Day: the 4069UB.

If you somehow missed them, here are the first three installments of Logic Noise:

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Logic Noise: The Switching Sequencer Has The Beat

February 23, 2015 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

Logic Noise is all about using logic circuits to make sounds. Preferably sound that will be enjoyable to hear and useful for making music. This week, we’ll be scratching the surface of one of my favorite chips to use and abuse for, well, nearly anything: the 4051 8-way analog switch. As the name suggests, you can hook up eight inputs and select one from among them to be connected up to the output. (Alternatively, you can send a single input to one of eight destinations, but we won’t be doing that here.)

Why is this cool? Well, imagine that you wanted to make our oscillator play eight notes. If you worked through our first installment, you built an abrasive-sounding but versatile oscillator. I had you tapping manually on eight different resistors or turning a potentiometer to eight different positions. This week, we’ll be letting the 4051 take over some of the controls, leaving us to do the more advanced knob twiddling.

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Logic Noise: 8-bits Of Glorious Sounds

February 17, 2015 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

Logic Noise is all about using analog circuits to make sounds. Preferably sound that will be enjoyable to hear and useful for making music. Now, the difference between music, sound, and noise is certainly in the ear of the behearer, but you must admit that last installment’s simple square wave lacked a little something. (Although the sync oscillator circuit extension was kinda cool.)

This week, we’ll take our single wimpy square-wave oscillator and beef it up by adding a bunch of sub-octaves to the mix. And we’ll do it using a chip that’ll be really useful for us in the future as well: the 4040 binary counter chip.

Counters (binary or decimal) are going to be fertile ground for more musical noise experiments. Why so? Because octaves are just doublings or halvings of frequencies, and because a lot of rhythmic patterns have factors of two underlying them. Just think about the most basic drum pattern you know: bass drum on the one, snare on one and three, and hi-hats on one, two, three, and four. Each different instrument fires off twice as frequently as the one before it.

But for now, enough blabber. We’ve got an oscillator to build.

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SingLock Protects Your Valuables From Shy People

December 17, 2014 by Rick Osgood 14 Comments

Two Cornell students have designed their own multi-factor authentication system. This system uses a PIN combined with a form of voice recognition to authenticate a user. Their system is not as simple as speaking a passphrase, though. Instead, you have to sing the correct tones into the lock.

The system runs on an ATMEL MEGA1284P. The chip is not sophisticated enough to be able to easily identify actual human speech. The team decided to focus their effort on detecting pitch instead. The result is a lock that requires you to sing the perfect sequence of pitches. We would be worried about an attacker eavesdropping and attempting to sing the key themselves, but the team has a few mechanisms in place to protect against this attack. First, the system also requires a valid PIN. An attacker can’t deduce your PIN simply by listening from around the corner. Second, the system also maintains the user’s specific voice signature.

The project page delves much more deeply into the mathematical theory behind how the system works. It’s worth a read if you are a math or audio geek. Check out the video below for a demonstration. Continue reading “SingLock Protects Your Valuables From Shy People” →

Tripping On Oscilloshrooms With An Analog Scope

December 13, 2014 by Sarah Petkus 19 Comments

This might be an old trick, but it’s still cool to see a functional tool like the oscilloscope manipulated for an unrelated purpose such as this. [Jerobeam Fenderson] made a video explaining how to input stereo audio into an old digital scope in order to create of all things, dancing mushrooms… because why not?

In this case, [Jerobeam] used a Tektronix D11 5103N set in X Y mode and attached the left and right channels from his RME Fireface UC audio interface. One channel corresponds with X, and the other with Y. From here, he controls the wave forms discretely with the help of software like Pure Data (Pd) and Max (not free, but more powerful) which are visual programming environments made to enable musicians and artists to create software without writing lines of code. His video explains how to make a circle out of a sine wave, and then beat the crap out of it with math far beyond our comprehension. The outcome is pretty mesmerizing and leaves us wanting to try it out ourselves. Luckily, if you’re interested in experimenting with the voice of sine waves… [Jerobeam] has more information on his blog on how to do some scope play of your own whether your hardware is analog or digital.

You can see the dancing mushrooms in his video below:

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Sound Isolation Box Makes Living Room Based CNC Routing Tolerable

September 28, 2014 by Rich Bremer 22 Comments

CNC Machines can be loud, especially if they are equipped with a high-speed router spindle. Unfortunately, such a loud racket could be a problem for the apartment dwellers out there. Fear Not! [Petteri] has come up with a solution. It’s a sound isolation enclosure for his mini CNC Router that doubles as furniture. It keeps the sound and dust in while pumping out some cool parts….. in his living room.

What may just look like a box with an upholstered top actually had a lot of thought put into the design. The front MDF panel folds down to lay flat on the floor so that the user can kneel on it to access the machine without putting unnecessary stress on the door hinges. The top also is hinged to allow some top-down access or permit a quick peek on the status of a job. All of the internal corners of the box were caulked to be air tight, even a little air passageway would allow sound and dust to escape. Two-centimeter thick sound insulation lines the entire interior of the box and the two access lids have rubber sealing strips to ensure an air tight seal when closed.

With stepper motors, the spindle motor and control electronics all running inside an enclosed box, there is some concern over heat build up. [Petteri] hasn’t had any problems with that so far but he still installed an over-temp power cutoff made from a GFCI outlet and a thermostat temperature switch. This unit will cut the mains power if the temperature gets over 50º C by intentionally tripping the GFCI outlet. None of the internal parts will ignite under 300º C, so there is quite a safety buffer.

Although the isolation box came out pretty good, [Petteri] admits there is room for improvement; when cutting wood or aluminum, the noise level is kind of annoying. If he had to do it again, he would use thicker MDF, 20mm instead of 5mm. However, during general use while cutting plastic, the router is still quieter than his dishwasher.

Video below.

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Party Ready Mini LED Volume Tower

July 10, 2014 by Nick Conn 8 Comments

Audio LED Light Tower

There are many very cool visual effects for music, but the best are the kind you build yourself. [Ben’s] mini LED volume towers adds some nice bling to your music.

[Ben] was inspired to created this project when he saw a variety of awesome stereo LED towers on YouTube (also referred to as VU meters). We have even featured a few VU meters, one very recently. [Ben] goes over every detail, including how to test your circuit (a very important part of any project). The schematic is deceptively simple. It is based on the LM3914 display driver IC, a simple chained comparator circuit is used to control the volume bar display. All you really need is a 3D printer to make the base, and you can build this awesome tower.

See the completed towers in action after the break. What next? It would be cool to see a larger tower that displays frequency magnitude!

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