#clock divider

A couple of days ago, I impulse-ordered the PCB/panel set of MidCentury Modular's "Dividers" module — a set of two clock dividers based on the 4024 and 4017 CMOS chips — so you can divide a signal by either a set of simultaneous powers of two between 2 and 128 or an integer between 2 and 9 — or, y'know, both in series, to divide by select compound numbers up to 1152.

(To back up a little, the purpose of a clock divider is to take as input a repeating gate at a given frequency, a clock pulse, and get out a clock at a frequency that's an integer dividend of that frequency. A basic use case would be for triggering drum sounds: if you're in 4/4 time, and you have one clock set to trigger hi-hats on every quarter note, and you want to also have a kick drum on the downbeat, you can just divide that original clock signal by 4. In addition to that kind of usage, these are also fast enough that they work on audio rate signals, where dividing the frequency by 2 gives you a square wave one octave down, and dividing by other numbers yields the subharmonic series as seen in things like Moog's Subharmonicon.)

But anyway, as is usually the case in such orders, once I'd bought the PCB/panel set, I realized I should probably check the Bill of Materials for parts I don't actually have on hand. The most obvious one was the SP8T rotary switch, but I also needed to get the matching LEDs — I could maybe scrounge up enough 3mm LEDs in the same color to populate the board, but they'd probably be a bunch of different brightnesses — and some of the specific sizes of capacitors. So I placed a couple of orders for those things.

It seems like everyone has MAKE N0ISE’s MATHS. The same cannot be said for the company’s TEMPI. The module is deep, to put it mildly. It’s one that took me a long time to fully appreciate, and I still go back to the manual on a regular basis, both to remember how to do stuff and to discover new and deeper functionality that was initially lost on me. 

It’s a shifting clock divider, but it can make and even generate beats, too. It can be programmed by human or by machine, and is easily modulated and controlled via CV and gate. The rhythmic options are limitless and constantly changing. 

An Introduction to Clock Dividers and Psychological Warfare

A while ago, [nsayer] was inspired by a Hackaday post to build one of the most insidious means of psychological warfare. I speak, of course, of the [Lord Vetinari] clock, a clock that ticks at random intervals, but still keeps accurate time. His build, the Crazy Clock, is a small controller board for off-the-shelf clock movements that adds the [Vetinari] feature to any clock by soldering only a few wires. The Crazy Clock is a pretty simple device consisting of only a 32.768 kHz crystal, a microcontroller, and a few transistors to pulse the movement of a clock mechanism. While …read more #ATtinyHacks, #Clock, #ClockDivider, #Microcontrollers, #Timer, #TimerPrescaler

finished building my 4ms RCD over the weekend. That stands for Rotating Clock divider, a Eurorack module which takes in a clock pulse and outputs divisions of that pulse. Sounds boring.

I am amazed to find that I can pretty much make an entire beat with this box spitting out gate pulses to my various devices. Put the hihat on the fastest pulse, put kicks and snare on the 2 and 4. combine the 3 and 5 outputs and trigger a melodic signal with a kind of ostinato pattern (or use that for high hat!).

I'm also pretty big headed that al lthe lights lit up and everything worked  the first time I plugged it in!

As much as I like soldering, I hate troubleshooting.