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And here we are. This is the final Twinklr, and I've spent the past week documenting it and working out how best to show it at Into The Wild, the MV Works show next week. That's right: Twinklr will be on show, and you can come and see it. There'll also be some films for those of you not near Somerset House at the end of next week. Anyhow. I'm currently building a website, editing films, and getting ready for a showcase. Things look good, though. I think this notebook is nearly done.
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Earlier today: where things are.
There are some rough edges, but a lot of things are working. When it’s good, it’s very good.
The only snag involves some electronics, and waiting a week and a bit for some PCBs - as well as some irritating Raspberry Pi funkiness. But we’re getting there, and we’ll have a live demo in our crit tomorrow.
One wired-up back panel. As, slightly, expected, the amplifier is massively rubbish, but at least it’s there - the line-out works nicely.
Voltages seem correct, so on Monday, we assemble the whole box. Exciting.
In today’s post was a PCB.
Normally, a PCB would be nicely silkscreened and covered in soldermask. This it not; it’s a very hasty prototype ordered from PCBTrain in order to confirm everything works.
Because there’s no soldermask, I decided to leave off a ground plane and instead do a point-to-point ground net. This would be enough to wire up the board without risk.
The board does a few things: it acts as a power switch; it hosts all the electronics that go on to talk to the Raspberry Pi; and it hosts a 1W amplifier. If you plug a jack into the lineout, the amplifier is bypassed and you connect straight to the Pi’s line out.
This was also useful to confirm if the back panel had been cut correctly. So far: looks like it might be. I’m waiting on one last component - a volume pot - to arrive. And then we can wire the whole thing together.
If that’s a go: well, then it’s time to build the thing for real.
I’ll probably get a nicer-looking PCB made in due course, but this prototype should be invaluable for next week’s final crit.
Here’s one use of Twinklr.
I’m running the software on my computer, rather than the final box, and using a remote encoder. I’m spitting MIDI out of Twinklr and into a MIDI-CV adaptor, which is then playing notes on the modular synthesizer. Two playheads are moving in opposite directions; as I play, I tweak the attack of the envelope.
Coming to life, as it were.
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Twinklr’s in a really good place too. I began week 173 following earlier defeats by porting the sound library to Beads, and that’s been very successful. I managed to get everything running on the Pi, with audio out of the USB interface, and with no glitching or errors. Some simple round-robin code gives us a fixed 16-voice polyphony, which I think should be enough for most people. I then continued porting the rest of the UI to a new library that, whilst not as fully-featured as ControlP5, is much happier on the touchscreen. And to cap it all, I implemented the MIDI output in The MIDI Bus. By the end of week 174, the software was feature-complete, and all working on the Pi in a remarkably stable manner. On Sunday, I sat playing with Twinklr on my laptop, as it happily sent data over cables to an analogue synth on my desk. This was hugely exciting because of how I felt. All of a sudden, I wasn’t wrestling with making it work, or wondering if it every would; I knew it did. And, as I fiddled with it, I realised I definitely wanted it off my laptop, and onto a desktop object I could put next to this synthesizer to play. For the first time, I really desired the finished object itself (rather than just desiring finishing it). That felt really good, and is some great momentum for the next week.
Tom Armitage » Weeks 173-174
Some good news from weeknotes this week. Hard to explain how exciting this all is. Will try to get some video of it all in action this week.
Today: drawing experiments with form.
I’m not really one of life’s natural drawers, so I’ve spent a day forcing myself into sketching and thinking. It went some interesting places that I will likely never make - but was good to push on from my initial points. Also, I now have some nice illustrations. More to come once they’re in a computer.
Boom.
This is huge progress - albeit perhaps a tad behind schedule. I’ve just about sussed the CAD tool now, and am going to be much faster working with it in future - and, for instance, correcting that gap at the right of the case. Otherwise, we’ve gone from a 3D mockup to a well-fitting 2D maquette.
I definitely think the case might be a tad larger than this - certainly more raised - but I’ve now got a good idea how much space for electronics there is, and definitely want it to feel a bit softer.
It helped that we fired up the more powerful lasercutter today - this case took about five minutes of cutting, as opposed the the 100 minutes it was going to take on the Little Laser Cutter That Could...
Right: onwards.
