Custom MIDI controller I designed and built for fun:

I am not a piano player, so I liked the idea of an MPC-style button grid. I figured this would also help me to think more in abstract patterns rather than keeping me confined to the C-major/A-minor scale. I only wanted six faders, as I cannot keep track of more than that at a time when recording automation of synthesizer or drum machine parameters.

16-button grid;  far left column sets the velocity, the bottom row sets the octave. The buttons to the right of the grid control the transport (play, record, stop, loop, etc.) and the jog wheel in the upper right is a rotary encoder, which allows me to scrub through a track several bars at a time.

GUTS!!! ATMega328, several 74HC955 74HC595 serial-to-parallel shift registers to control the LED matrix, a 74HC195 to decode the button matrix, and assorted logic chips to debounce and decode the quadrature signal from the rotary encoder.

The enclosure was a wooden box from a thrift shop. I cut it off at an angle with my Dremel tool, then traced out a hole on the top in which to fit a handheld "Lights Out" game. I set the upper half of the game enclosure into the panel and drew a bead around it with JB Cold Weld, sanding it smooth when it was dry. Many coats of red enamel were added to the panel, and the sides were stained with acrylic paints and sealed with polyurethane varnish (sanded between coats, of course).

High-altitude ballooning and natural radio events

One of the projects for my Electricity and Magnetism class last fall was to conduct original research using a high-altitude weather balloon. The goal of our group was to record the sound of distant lightning strikes (called atmospherics or 'spherics) and other naturally occurring very-low-frequency (VLF) radio events. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_atmospheric

I constructed the receiver, right, and assembled the pod, above. Our balloon made it to about 30,000 feet, about a third of what we had hoped for. We suspect that the strength of our balloon was compromised due to its coming into contact with skin oils during the launch. Although nitrile gloves are worn by the launch crew as a precaution, it was extremely windy and the balloon was bonking everybody's heads.

Still, our experiment pod was a success and we recorded about an hour's worth of 'spherics. I processed all our data using Native Instruments' Reaktor, a graphical programming language normally used to design software synthesizers. I was able to abuse bend the software to my will in order to filter out unwanted noise and to measure the amount and strength of 'spheric activity in one-minute intervals. More detail on our experiment can be viewed at the Whitworth Near Space Wiki.

New Blog

Yesterday marked the first day of the school year for me. It is the last year of my undergraduate studies, and I decided to start a new blog to document some of my projects and adventures (past, present, and future).