Prototyping with a couple of bread boards.

After a nightmare customs ordeal, I finally received my large order of potentiometers but sadly with a much lighter wallet than anticipated… Some freight forwarders are shifty money thieving nasties! Beware!!

With potentiometers in hand, I dusted off my bread boards and started prototyping. I’m currently working on finalising two circuits.

First is a circuit adapted from Forrest M. Mims III‘s popular 1984 “Stepped Tone Generator” (Named The Atari Punk Console by Kaustic Machines). It’s an extremely lofi Synth based around two 555 timer integrated circuits or one dual 556. My version will share a few similarities with Curious Inventor’s “Voice of Saturn” and will include a third 555 IC acting as an LFO and the ability to stop the second 555′s oscillation as well as a few other tweaks I am working on.

Second is a 4017 “Baby 10” style sequencer which will have to ability to control among many other things the Stepped Tone Generator through it’s CV inputs. I have been inspired by the work of a few DIYers and their 4017 sequencers such as Peter Edwards (of Casper Electronics), Fonik, Ken Stone and Ray Wilson just to name a few…

This is my current kit: cheap plastic 0.5mm side-click mechanical pencil and three (the third is stuck to my index finger) erasers. Also, I’m pleased to say the new drawings are coming along quite nicely… You might be able to just make one out in the background.

Currently occupying my drawing desk in this unfinished state, is the above rough outline from my tattoo themed series. If it wasn’t for battling evil and dishonest thieves who disguise themselves as a webhost (the treacherous Solidinternet) and Mr Bill Gates with his horrible IE series of browsers, which are notoriously full of CSS bugs, it would probably be finished by now…

Howdy, I have been a bit of a ghost round these parts lately and thought you may like to know why. One of the many reasons is I have been buried in collecting equipment and parts to modify and “circuit bend“. Circuit bending is basically the art of short circuiting. You open up toys, music equipment, anything that makes a sound really (although I wouldn’t advise people to go poking around AC powered devices) and add switches, resistors, capacitors, cut trace lines and feed the electrons through alternate paths on the board to change the sound. Here is a closer look at some of my favourites:

Casio’s famous SK1 keyboard. I actually own two of these and am pretty excited about bending both of them. I’ve been hard at work carefully planing everything I will do to their insides and outsides…

Synsonics – Mattel’s analog drum machine. I’m adding sound controls and will re-case the whole unit.

Children’s voice changer megaphone. I bent this a while back but since then it has suffered a fall. I should probably re-case it, as gaffer-tape ghetto is not really the look I am going for. I have a few more circuit tweaks planned for it too.

Yamaha RX-17 drum machine. Going to add a modular style banana plug patch bay to this one.

Toy piano with a piezo pick-up I added. The pick-up was installed years ago. Since then I have collected a few more that will get the same treatment and maybe tone controls as well.

You may be pleased to hear that I have also been working on some new drawings…

The designs are almost finished. These badges should be making their way into the online shop quite soon…

Stay tuned!!

Yes, I recently created a Facebook page for those of you who are into that sort of thing.

After much work, Grandpa Studios V3 is finally ready enough to receive a decent general public live testing! Everything seems to be running reasonably stable in Firefox and Safari… Still working on a few abnormalities with every web developers favorite browser; Internet Explorer. Arrgh, I really can’t imagine why anyone would run this browser out of choice with free code like Firefox floating around begging for you to download and install.

If while navigating through the new site you manage to find anything askew, it really would be quite handy if you let me know. Browser details and a screenshot (if it is something visual) would be a plus!

Just a note: the shop is currently only stocked with fake items for testing purposes. You are however more than welcome to buy the nonexistent items listed. I’ll happily take your money and spend it wisely, just don’t expect anything to arrive in the mail.

I really should be spending less time coding and editing images and more time drawing…