Better late than never?

Well, It’s been a while and yeah I’m failing at updating this blog regularly.

First an update on synth stuff, I’ve been working on a front panel for my synths, I’m currently fed up with the sound of the analogue synths I’ve heard (though I will say the GS e7 sounds amazing) and I want to build one for myself, this isn’t a product I plan to sell.

I’ve designed the voice, using two SSI VCO chips and an NJM2069 VCF/VCA (as I have a few), I’ve got the PCBs for that but haven’t got around to building any yet.

The front panel also uses a lot of the same code/parts as the Delta panel, so when I bought the panel for Delta I also bought the panel for this, which I’m calling Epsilon for now.

Here’s a picture showing it with some LEDs on and me testing the multiplexing of the LEDs, which is thankfully working as I would expect. We have two “mod/bodge” wires, one because I forgot to run power to the programmer port and one because a track seems to be shorted to ground somewhere, so not too bad for a first revision of PCB.

As you can see I’ve gone with green LEDs, no reason other than everyone seems to use red these days. The red LEDs you can see are just to show the various power supplies and signals are ok and won’t be visible once in a case.

I’ve got 6 OLED displays which look way better in real life than they do in the picture. next steps is to add some more potentiometers (the two already on there are working) to test the remainder of the ADC multiplexing and then build up the voice modules.

Aside from the oscillator sections, and a couple of other things in the VCF, this will be the same for Delta and the code should be around 90% the same, which should mean Delta comes up very quickly.

As for me and what’s going on, well the black dog is still visiting and I’m still struggling with depression and lack of energy/motivation/mojo. I’ve got some extended holiday over the Christmas holidays so I’m hoping to get some more work done on these. But, I’ve learned not to put too much pressure on myself as that ends up getting me down if I don’t get things done, so no promises.