Thea Flowers built a really cool Sega-Genesis inspired synthesizer, the Genesynth.
Thea had been toying around with building a synthesizer for a while but was lacking inspiration, then she came up with the idea to build a synth using the same chip as the Sega Genesis. The Genesis was one of the last consoles to feature a synthesizer instead of samples and CD playback. This created the distinctive sound of the soundtracks to their iconic games.
The Genesynth uses the Yamaha YM2612 FM syntheses chip, the same chip used in the Sega Genesis. A Teensy 3.5 interfaces between the chip and a USB-MIDI connection. A high-quality audio amplifier was used. While it’s far better than the original Genesis amplifier, it still retains the same filter roll-off so you can hear the chip’s9-bit DAC’s distortion.
Thea says that the project took weeks of research, months of iteration, and nearly a year of programming. This was not only her first synthesizer build, but her also her first hardware build. It also gave her the opportunity to learn to make PCBs, which she did with style.
This Twitter Moment is a collection of her Tweets about the project. It includes some short audio clips so you can hear the Genesynth in action.
I worked on a tiny piece of the Embrace sculpture at Burning Man 2014.
Inside were 2 hearts, one made here in Portland by Lostmachine Andy & others at Flat Rat Studios. I made electronics to gradually fade 4 incandescent light bulbs in heart beating patterns.
These wonderful photos where taken by Sarah Taylor.
Inside the enormous sculpture were two hearts. The blue on was built by a group in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, and of course this one was built here in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Andy wanted this heart to have a very warm, gentle atmosphere, with warn incandescent bulbs slowly fading to create the heart beat. These effect turned out quite well. Andy really knows his stuff!
Here’s a great time-lapse video where you can see the slow, gradual incandescent light fading as a rapid heart beat. Skip forward to about 0:36 in this video.
The light fading was done using a Teensy-based 4-channel AC dimmer board, on this 4 by 3.5 inch circuit board.
Here’s a quick video, from the first test of the light controller.
Four BT139X Triacs that actually switch the AC voltage are mounted on the bottom side to a heatsink that’s meant to dissipate any heat to the metal case. Originally Andy believed the lights might be 500 watts each, so I was concerned about heat. In the end, four 60 watt bulbs were used and the Triacs did not get noticeably warm.
Here is a parts placement diagram for building the circuit board. Two boards were built, the one that ran the project and a spare… just in case!
The PCB cad files are attached below, if anyone wants to make more of these boards.
The AC switching circuitry was basically Fairchild Semiconductor’s recommended circuit for the MOC3023 optical isolator, which allows a Teensy 2.0 board to safely control the AC voltage. Four copies of this circuit were built on the board.
This circuit requires the Teensy 2.0 to know the AC voltage timing, so it can trigger the Triac at the right moment. Triggering early in the AC waveform causes the Triac to conduct near the full AC voltage for maximum brightness. Triggering later reduces the brightness.
To get the AC timing, I built this special power supply onto the board.
The Teensy 2.0 receives pulses on pins 5 and 6 as the AC waveform cycles positive and negative.
One caveat is this approach depends on the AC voltage being a sine wave. The AC voltage was one of the first questions I asked Andy, and he was told Burning Man would supply a true sine wave AC voltage. When he got out there, it turned out the power was actually a “modified sine wave”, which really isn’t anything like a sine wave. This circuit didn’t work well. Fortunately, they were able to run the lighting from a small generator that produced a true sine wave.
With the AC timing arriving on pins 5 and 6, and 4 pins able to trigger Triacs, and 3 pins connected to analog voltages for changing speed, brightness and pattern, the only other major piece of this technology puzzle is the software.
In this code, loop() tracks the changes in the waveform on pins 5 & 6, and it fires the Triacs at their programmed times. 120 times per second (each AC half cycle), the recompute_levels() function runs, which reads the analog controls and changes the Triac time targets, which loop() uses to actually control the voltage outputs.
This article was originally published on the DorkbotPDX website, on September 3, 2014. In late 2018, DorkbotPDX removed its blog section. An archive of the original article is still available on the Internet Archive. I am republishing this article here, in the hope it may continue to be found and used by anyone interested in the Embrace art installation or any other project needing sequenced AC light dimming effects.
These comments where written on the old site:
From Brandon:
Once we determined that the AC source was modified sine, I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to help the situation easily in the middle of the desert 🙂
As someone who looked over the board and what not, nice job! Worked really well and looked amazing in operation (on the right power source).
Rev two, perhaps rectified DC drive of the incandescent lights to avoid the modified sine issue? So many folks use those types of inverters to cut costs on big artwork solar installations.
Cheers and thanks for contributing!
From Anonymous:
The embrace structure was prettty cool, I got a chance to explore it at Burninman this year. Wish I got to see it burn down, the videos looked amazing. I assume you guys removed the heart materials before that happened.
Max “Litruv” Boonzaayer came up with a modular design where design pieces can be quickly combined to create MIDI controllers with any number of knobs & sliders.
The idea behind the project was to design modules to connect to a 10x10cm PCB.
Not your run-of-the-mill webcam, Mike’s photobooth uses a Canon DSLR camera and softbox lighting for superior quality photos. The booth does preview, customization, printing, and can automatically upload to the internet, but is easy for anyone to use with a giant arcade button.
As the official photographer for a good friend’s wedding, Mike decided he wanted an “open air booth” with built-in softbox lighting and could use a dSRL camera. It also needed to be easy to use as the official photog he didn’t want it to consume his time at the wedding.
The photo booth is built on a rolling tool cabinet making it easy to cart around. It runs the dSLR Remote Pro software on an old HP Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz computer. A Teensy is used to add arcade style buttons to simulate keyboard shortcuts in the software to allow the user to switch between photo/video modes, start the image/video capture, and enable/disable the camera’s live view.
Most Arduino SPI tutorials show this simple but poor SPI bus design:
Better SPI bus design can prevent conflicts. 3 simple improvements are needed:
Use pullup resistors on all chip select signals.
Verify tri-state behavior on MISO: use a tri-state buffer chip if necessary.
Protect bus access with SPI.beginTransaction(settings) and SPI.endTransaction().
Step 1: Pullup Resistors for Chip Select & Reset Signals
When multiple SPI devices are used, and especially when each is supported by its own library, pullup resistors are needed on the chip select pins.
Without a pullup resistor, the second device can “hear” and respond to the communication taking place on the first device, if that second device’s chip select pin is not pulled up. This is easy to understand in hindsight, but it can be temendously confusing and frustrating to novice Arduino users who purchase shields or breakout boards without pullup resistors. Each SPI device works when used alone, but they sometimes mysteriously fail when used together, only because both devices are hearing communication meant to initialize only the first device!
A simpe workaround for devices without pullup resistor involves adding code at the beginning of setup.
void setup() {
pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(4, HIGH);
pinMode(10, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(10, HIGH);
delay(1);
// now it's safe to use SD.begin(4) and Ethernet.begin()
}
Step 2: Proper MISO Tri-State Behavior
Most SPI chips will tri-state (effectively disconnect) their MISO pin when their chip select signal is high (inactive).
However, some chips do not have proper MISO tri-state behavior. Fortunately, checking MISO tri-state is easy, especially when prototyping on a breadboard. Just connect two 10K resistors to the MISO line, like this:
When all SPI chips are disabled, the MISO signal should “float” to approximately half the Vcc voltage. If any device is still driving the MISO line, you’ll see a logic high (usually close to 3.3V or 5.0V) or logic low (close to zero volts). This test is so easy, it should always be performed by designers of Arduino compatible products.
Arduino shields and breakout boards with poorly-behaved chips should always include a tri-state buffer. Adafruit’s CC3000 breakout board is a good example:
Step 3: USB SPI Transactions in Software
Newer versions of Arduino’s SPI library support transactions. Transactions give you 2 benefits:
Your SPI settings are used, even if other devices use different settings
Your device gains exclusive use of the SPI bus. Others will not disturb you.
These improvements solve software conflicts, allowing multiple SPI devices to properly share the SPI bus.
SPI.beginTransaction() takes a special SPISettings variable, which give the maximum clock speed, the data order, and clock polarity mode. The speed is give as an ordinary number, expressing the maximum clock speed that device can use. The SPI library will automatically select the fastest clock available which is equal or less than your number. This allows your code to always use the best speed, even on board with different clock speeds.
If your code will ever call SPI library functions from within an interrupt (eg, from attachInterrupt), you must call SPI.usingInterrupt(). For example:
If you are developing a library that must be compatible with older versions of Arduino, which lack these SPI transaction functions, you can use SPI_HAS_TRANSACTION to check for the new version. For example:
Many SPI-based products for Arduino do not work well together. My hope is this information can help all makers of Arduino compatible devices to achieve much better compatibility.
Long-term, sharing of knowledge is needed. Please share this information and ask makers of SPI devices and libraries to consider these suggestions.
This article was originally published on the DorkbotPDX website, on November 24, 2014. In late 2018, DorkbotPDX removed its blog section. An archive of the original article is still available on the Internet Archive. I am republishing this article here, in the hope it may continue to be found and used by everyone using SPI chips, and especially companies making SPI-based products for the Arduino community.
Not only is Adam a bit obsessed with the trackball mouse, but he’s also a billiards fan. So when he saw a character using a 9-Ball mouse in the movie Oceans 8, he knew he had to have one.
He used an arcade trackball as a base and added some LED arcade buttons. A 3-D printing housing was create to custom fit his hand. A custom PCB made it easy to wire the buttons and trackball to the Teensy and also made it easy to mount the electronics.
The USB HID functionality of a Teensy along with the Encoder library made quick work of the code for the project.
Code for the project as well as the PCB designs and CAD files are available on GitHub.
Ben McInnes, Adoné Kitching, Jason Sutherland, and Luc Wolthers created an amazing game – Guitar Wizards.
Guitar Wizard is a game based of the classic Guitar Hero game. Rather than play for points, the players battle each other, head on, playing riffs on the modified Guitar Hero controllers, shooting LED notes at each other. The opposing player blocks the notes by playing their own notes and chords.
This amazing, interactive game is powered by a Teensy 3.6, has over 2,000 WS2812B LEDs, and uses the FastLED library.
You can read more about the inspiration for the game here.
Wojciech Sura (forum user spook) has made a very useful tool for creating and editing fonts for the ILI9341 display
Until now, the only way to get custom fonts in the ILI9341 display has been a converter script. Now you can actually create & edit fonts with a beautiful graphics editor.
This useful app includes a number of features, including:
Create font from scratch (specify size, default offset and delta)
Create font from existing system TTF font
Easy to use editor with zoom (mouse wheel) and scroll (middle button) as well as continuous drawing
Quick optimization of character or the whole set (removes empty columns and rows while keeping character’s position and size)
Export to ILI9341_t3 format (.h + .cpp)
The editor is available in this GitLab repository. It does require Visual Studio 2017 to build. If you don’t have access to Visual Studio, spook has posted a build in this forum thread.
The SID was a popular sound synthesizer chip from the 1980s used in the Commodore 64 computer. Much to the dismay of many nostalgic computer enthusiasts, it hasn’t been manufactured for many years.
Petros used a Teensy 3.6 and some level shifting boards to intercept address and data lines of a SID chip. He also used the Teensy Audio Library and the ReSID Library by Frank Bösing (from his C64 emulation).
gdsports has made a joystick splitter that solves the problem of the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) ignoring the hat switch on the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Flight Stick.
The splitter uses 2 Teensy-LC boards and an Adafruit ItstyBitsy to remap the joystick controls and maps the Logictech Flight Stick to the XAC in the following ways:
