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@twinklr-notebook
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.
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.
Good progress with the case. I think this is the final design.
It’s made of 6mm ply and 3mm acrylic. All the acrylic can be cut from a single 600x400mm sheet; the ply is about half a 600x400mm sheet. It’s designed to be bolted together with 14mm M3 bolts. A lot of measuring twice and cutting once has paid off.
I am probably going to take a second pass at the engraving - the legend on the DC jack to indicate whether the tip is positive or negative failed to come out - and I do wonder if I should attempt an acrylic infill.
But for now, good to know it’s all coming together.
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.
By the end of last Friday, this is where we were.
This is a full-size version of the case; I think it’s going to be this shape. The sides are 6mm ply; the rest of it is 3mm acrylic. The electronics all hang from the screen mount; the bezel on top covers that up.
I built this in clear acrylic because a) it’s useful for testing and b) it’s what I had lying around. The final thing will not be clear. Also, the final thing will be bolted together - this friction-fit was just to test sizing, and dial in the settings on the laser cutter.
The good news is that this is much better than the old maquette, has space for everything, and has given me the ability to start putting all the bolt slots in and ordering the final pieces. It might not look like much, but it’s big progress from where I am.
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.
(via OP-SCHOOL 08: Sketch - YouTube)
The Teenage Engineering OP-1 has a sequencer that behaves like an Etch-a-Sketch. This reminded me of the way that, on encountering Twinklr, the second thing people do - after initially playing with it - is try to draw a picture. Also: something something the lineage of visual scores.
How important are a few milliseconds? When it comes to sequencers, they can mean the difference between a perfect groove and a sloppy mess. We talk to drum machine pioneer Roger Linn to discover the secrets of perfect musical timing and find out why the…
“There are a few factors that have contributed to natural, human-feeling grooves in my drum machines. In order of importance.:..”
And then, Roger Linn goes on to describe what he thinks the core instrumentiness of a Linn drum machine - be it a Linndrum, a MPC, or a Tempest - are. I really like how clear and plainspoken this is, and entirely in service of the performer or musician, rather than of a specific ideal.
Also: fascinating to see a train of thought carried on for so long.
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.
(via Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles) - YouTube)
Oh good lord.
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.
And here's where we are today.
I’m thinking a decent amount about the enclosure for Twinklr.
To that end, I’m playing a lot in Fusion360 to sketch out a frame - and to wrap my head around CAD software. CAD’s all a bit new for me - I’ve done a lot of Sketchup in my time, but nothing quite so carefully constructed as this. The goal is to make a case that can be lasercut, probably. And so I’m sat, building a case out of 3mm sheets.
The above is where I got to last by last night: a correctly modelled touchscreen, along with a suitably modelled Pi and Touchscreen PCB. I’ve made a hole in the “middle” layer to take everything that has to pass through it. Today, I’ve built up the rest of the case, adding tabs for support, removing lots of overhangs.
It’s slow, careful work, and sometimes I’m wrestling the software a bit - but it really does all look like it might come together. I’ve spent some time making cardboard and paper maquettes on the lasercutter to confirm my measurements, which has been hugely reassuring. Might have something to show by the end of the week - always good for new tools and new materials.
“...there’s something to a real music instrument. It’s not a piece of software, it’s not something where you - well, perfect example - you have a little keyboard with a row of unlabelled knobs. Well, what do those knobs do? Well, that depends on what software you have in, so it has this plugged in, it might do one thing, it’s this it’s something else. And that software might stop working in five years if you don’t update it every year. It’s just not a musical instrument. Something like this [the Prophet 6] if you grab this knob, it’ll do the same thing today, tomorrow, thirty years for now. It’s actually kinda nice - I could say you could keep this for 30 years. Because people have Prophet-5s from 35 years ago and are still using them (and in fact they cost more now than they did when we sold them).” - 1:30ish in An Evening With Dave Smith Part I
I liked this nugget on instrumentiness from this long, informal chat with Dave Smith (of Sequential Circuits/DSI fame). I think instruments can be made out of software, for sure, but the value to the same thing does the same thing is high.
I built some new legs for the Raspberry Pi Touchscreen.
The original legs are desinged to hold it at about 60º, and at tabletop level. This moves it to about 75º, and lifts it up. The right leg has a large hole in front of the USB ports.
My digital calipers had run out of batteries, but were clearly accurate enough in their analogue calibration to get things right: a short while in Fusion360 (which I’m definitely getting faster with) and I had some legs ready to go.
Because the original legs were 6mm, and I only had 3mm acrylic, I had to make four legs. But everything fitted together in the end: the wobbliness of the design is exacerbated, but I could find a simple way to brace them I’m sure.
I’m not sure this is the final angle of a Twinklr screen, but at least I’ve now got something to play with. It goes quite well with the little wooden crankhandle stand. So now I’ve got some sample hardware to tinkle with.
Of course, clearly the next thing is getting the software running on the Raspberry Pi…