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.
And then tonight, after all that, I realized I don't have enough jacks to build the thing, either — I only have eight thonkiconns left right now, and this thing takes 12. At least I'd been meaning to place a big order of those soon anyway!











