It begins

I figured I should have a place to document the synth stuff I'm doing. Right now there isn't a whole lot happening. This is due to the fact that I'm in the process of building a house so a lot of cash is tied up in that.

I did end up getting a scope. A 5 channel 100Mhz analog which, while not as nice as a digital scope, is plenty good for what I want to do. It should be a step up over the 60Mhz Hitachi I used to have.

Unfortunately, I don't really have the space for a proper workshop until we move into said house. Once everything settles down I have a few projects in mind:

1) Give my MidiBox SID a proper home.

I've had the boards built and working for a few years now, but I've never gotten around to putting them in the case I bought. Now that my father-in-law has gotten me a proper drill, and I've gotten my step bit back from my parents house, I should be able to make the front panel look halfway decent.

I also want to end the love/hate relationship I've had with LCD screens. Every time I attempt to wire one up it never seems to work. I even fried a really nice graphical LCD back in my college days. Hopefully I can get the screen I bought for my MidiBox SID going and then I'll be able to actually edit patches w/o having to rely on MIDI.

2) Ian Fritz's Sawtooth VCO

I've been spending some time recently going over this circuit and simulating it in LTSpice. I may end up using a CA3083 instead of the LM394 he has listed. Mostly because I already have 2 CA3083's on hand. So far my spice simulations are looking good. I'm going to attempt to work on a perfboard layout next. After that it's time to order parts and build!

3) AVR based VCDO

I took the inspiration for this from Eric Brombaugh's Digital VCO, which is basically a voltage controlled digital oscillator. I plan on basing this around an ATTiny28, again because that's what I have available to me. I'm also considering an AVR based on the fact that I've seen it used successfully in other synth projects such as AVRSyn.

4) Bench Computer

I have my wife's old college computer just sitting around in the basement collecting dust so I thought I might put it to work as a bench computer. One of the bonuses is the fact that it has hardware parallel and serial ports. This will let me use the AVR and PIC programming cables I already have lying around instead of buying new USB based programmers.

I'm considering putting Linux (probably Ubuntu) on it for a few reasons. First, I would like to try out gEDA. From what I've read it seems like a pretty neat piece of software, but it's Linux only at the moment. I could try and get it running using cygwin, but I'm much to lazy to figure that out. Second I've read about gcc toolchains for both AVR and PIC (including dsPic) that are available for Linux and I would like to see how those work.

So, though I'm not doing much at the moment, I do have a lot of ideas in the hopper. Stay tuned and I'll keep updating