Speed, Delta & Doves

Speed

The world is moving at an incredible rate lately, now I know as you get older your neurons fire slower and time seems to move quicker, but that’s not what I mean.

Everyone is in a rush, a rush to make things, a rush to get places a rush to buy and received stuff and people seem to be incredibly impatient, now I caught myself doing this and I was shocked. I blame amazon for their “next day delivery”, and sometimes same day which is just nuts. It’s made us all impatient and rush to do things and expect things.

The item in question for me was this uConsole from Clockwork Pi.

I mean how neat is that? handy for those times you want a quick serial debugger, or a quick browse of a pinout for a chip whilst working on something?
But it’s on a 90 day lead time, initially I was “nah that’s too long” but then I figured, hang on it would take me way more than 3 months to make this and a large portion of this is down to the chip shortages.

I think we, as a society, are getting so used to instant gratification that it’s hurting us, not only as consumers (as we may settle for something less than what we want because we can have it now) but also as developers and product manufacturers as customers (like me) can be impatient.

Long story short, I pre-ordered one anyway 🙂
(Do check out their devterm also, it’s great)

Delta

Now some people know I’ve been developing a polysynth for a while, and I’m happy to say that I now have 8 fully functioning voices running on the prototype

Now as you can see I’m using a teensy and a CMODA7, both because, well you guess it, you can’t get actual chips right now. So this is letting continue development whist things get back to normal, whatever shape that will be next year. The unfitted chip is a CODEC that will be used for effects, that part is not yet done.

Here is the current panel, which is just there until I’ve got things sorted with all the features and debugged everything, from there, who knows what the final panel will look like.

When I’ve got the panel working fully and most of the parameters under control (currently only a few basics, like oscillator level, cutoff, resonance, etc) I’ll post a video on YouTube.

Now my day job is really busy and quite challenging, in case you don’t know I now work for Space Forge making electronics for space. We currently have one mission due to launch any day (on the Virgin Orbit launch from Cornwall) and another due next year, as a result when I finish my day I’m pretty exhausted, so the energy I have for other projects, like Delta, is a lot less than previously. Also I have Suzi, our Saluki, in my life and I enjoy spending time with her.

Dove

Sadly, like a lot of companies, the lack of chips means I have no products to sell, which means no money coming in, but there are still bank fees, accountants fees, etc going out. The result is that Dove Audio is out of money and I will be closing the business shortly.

What does this mean for Delta and MuSeq? Well, I will still be working on them, but until chips become available nothing more can happen. Maybe I’ll do a kickstarter? maybe I’ll restart Dove Audio? but for now sadly, it’s time to close it.

This isn’t a decision I’ve taken lightly and I am gutted to have to do this.