Modd3d

Midify is a tiny little board I’ve been working on that lets you add a MIDI port to a Game Boy or just about anything.

I started designing it when I got my PixelH8 Music Tech cartridge. I loved the cartridge, but I found it really hard to play music on the buttons of my Game Boy SP (I can’t play very well anyway but that’s beside the point). I wanted to get authentic Nintendo sounds and be able to play them live, but using a real keyboard. Then I started thinking about all the people doing chiptune/8-bit type music with random pieces of electronic gear who might want to do the same thing and Midify was born.

What is gain structure?  It’s the thing that can make thousands of dollars worth of sound gear sound really bad if you do it wrong.  Even when your sound system is turned down to the point where it is very quiet it can still sound distorted if it is clipping anywhere along the signal path.

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Welcome to part 2 of my DMX512 tutorial. Last time I talked about some of the basics of the protocol and how to implement it. In this installment we’ll dig a little deeper.

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DMX512 is a control protocol that is used by most lighting gear these days. The basic idea behind it is to allow you control a whole bunch of things by only hooking up a few wires. Let’s say you have a light board and 12 dimmers. Instead of having to run a separate wire to each dimmer, the commands for each dimmer are sliced up and fed down 3 wires one after the other. The dimmers receive the commands, locate the ones that are addressed to them and turn on or off accordingly.

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Walk-through attractions are getting more detailed all the time.  Lifelike characters, multiple audio tracks and even themed scents continue to add to their realism.  Why not add some interactive audio ambience to make your rooms sound larger than life?

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A hacked-up keyboard is a cheap and fairly simple way to add a switch-type input to a PC. Why would you want to do this? Let’s say you are building a haunted house. With just your hacked keyboard and Winamp you have all kinds of things you can do:

• Give your monsters a hidden button to activate monster sounds
• Play a welcome message whenever a tour guide presses a garage door opener
• Have a door creak whenever it is opened
• Play a scream when someone steps on a pressure mat
• Show a video on a projector when a “victim” is sensed by a motion sensor

The artistic part is up to you; the point is to make the computer do something when something happens in the real world. Read on to find out how.

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Hand flashers are fun effects- they let you shoot a ball of fire right out of your hand. They’re great for plays, haunted houses, magic tricks, practical jokes and showing off in front of cute girls/guys. Who doesn’t love fire? The effect uses flash cotton and flash paper which burn so fast that it is fairly safe.

I just found an Instructable that tells you how you can make your own hand flasher / fireball shooter. During the recent production of Cats I did tech for (the one that gave birth to the confetti cannon) I ended up buying a hand flasher because I didn’t have time to engineer one myself and it cost me over 50 bucks. I wish this Instructable was around a couple months ago.

Anyway, most of the stuff needed to build the thing is available at Home Depot (your in-store engineering headquarters!). I was sort of hoping that the author had come up with a nifty way of making a glo-plug (used to ignite the flash-cotton) out of parts from the Depot too but that you have to order online. You also need to get the flash cotton and flash paper from somewhere, but your town probably has a magic shop if you don’t feel like ordering it online.

For those of you following the MMM, things are coming along nicely. The first thing you’ll notice is that graphics have a new look and feel to them (they’re now stealthy black).

The picture below shows the first 8 units; two production prototypes and serial numbers 1-6 (mine is number 6 in the top-right corner). Each synth consists of two cabinets which can be latched together face-to-face for easy portability. As you can see they can also be connected together horizontally and vertically so you can still make your giant wall-of-synth even though each MMM is pretty tiny.

I got to design the MIDI to CV module for the MMM. It was a fun project and we added some features to it that are pretty unique, like fixed-time and stepped glide. In the picture the MIDI / Power Supply modules are finished, but many of the other modules in the pic are just front panels right now. George is hoping to have everything finished by the end of April.

For more information on this project check out the Mattson Mini Modular web site.

Charlie Richmond of Richmond Sound Design fame has on his site a PDF detailing the retrofit of the show control system for the Waterworld show at Universal Studios Hollywood he did in 2007. The old system was run by an Amiga and used MSC for just about everything. They ended up having to replace and test the entire system in about 2.5 days.

Unlike most “behind the scenes” stuff, this PDF has a bunch of pictures of the old and new system as well as descriptions of how things work. It also contains the crazy timeline they had to work with for the retrofit.

Casperelectronics has a whole bunch of schematics for circuit-bending various devices, including some new ones for the Speak & Spell.