Atomic Sonic

I've started building guitar pedals under the company name Atomic Sonic. You'll be able to find out more over at www.atomicsonicfx.wordpress.com This site will probably die off, haven't used it in a while, probably won't. So check out ASFX for future effects and misc electronics mumbo jumbo. Cheers. Oh, and happy new year.

Some Pedal Demos

Here's a couple demos on pedals I've designed. First up, the Speed Impediment tremolo. Just a simple tremolo with one control, rate.



Next, we have one of my favorites, the Orbital Static digital reverb. Two controls, tail and feedback. The feed back is kind of a gradual ramp that turns into a loud cacophonous feedback. I can build these for you if you want. If you're interested, shoot me an email at palme.dylan(AT)gmail.com.

EL Wire Pedal Board

Over the past week or so I've been working on this thing. Had some EL wire hanging around from the failed drum light experiment so I decided to put it to some good use! It's only held on with scotch tape right now, but I plan on gluing when I can get to the store and buy some.

The power supply with 6 9V outputs.

The EL wire inverter.

Atari 2600 Teardown

I recently picked up two Atari 2600 consoles and a box of games at the flea market for $40. As a nerd of all sorts I jumped on it. I've seem single consoles go for that price so I thought that if they both work I can sell one and make my money back.

So I get it home, plug the first one in and it worked. Perfect. Plug the second one in, turn it on, no dice. Oh well, let's see if it's fixable. A perfect chance to get a tear down on one of these!

4 screws on the bottom open the console up easily and reveal the boring side of the board. When I first cracked this thing open I found a huge amount of nasty dust. It looks like this poor thing was kept under a sand dune for a couple decades.

The traces are pretty odd, it looks like they're done with foil tape and are now wrinkling due to 30 years of age.

The last revision is 1980, these 4 switch consoles with the classic wood paneling were produced from 1980 to 1982. The date codes on the IC's places this console at the 15th week of 1982.

Every nook and cranny on this board was covered with that nasty dust. It didn't help that I ran out of dust spray the other day. To get the majority of dust away from sensitive places I just used a Q-tip to push it out of the way.

Some flux was left on when the board was made and that dust got caught up in it. Gross.

Aha! I found the problem (I'm assuming). These switches are connected to the shielding can with this metallic foil to ground them. The thing is, there's no continuity. By simply detaching it and reattaching the foil they began to conduct again.

Four of these bent metal pins hold the can on. They're easily bent to fix this. 

Lovely ROMs with the '82 date codes.

EL Fail

One thing I was worried about was the EL wire not being bright enough. Well, I was right. Yes, I realize this picture was taken during the day and my window shade was open, but even at midnight with the lights off it's not that bright.

 

So that sucks. But there's always my first plan of using LED's. Thankfully I had a spare white LED hanging around, so I threw that under the head. A lot more impressive.

 A lot brighter, and that's only one. This will also work better with the beat sensing feature. I tried switching the EL wire, and it didn't work. Switching LED's with transistors, childs play. I think I'll make a video for the transistor switching, so look for that in a little bit!

Drum Lights: Quick Update

The wire arrived a few days ago! I feel like this will add a great ambient glow behind the white heads of Josh's toms, snare, and kick drum. Now I'm waiting for some MOSFET's to arrive from Mammoth so I can achieve beat sensing! Hopefully I'll have more to share at the end of the week!

Drum Lighting Rig

The band I'm in is hoping to do shows in the near future and we want to leave some sort of impression on the audience. What's one thing smaller bands don't utilize [often]? Light rigs. Yeah we've seen bands spend $5 on multicolored Christmas lights and drape them on their amps, but that just won't cut it for us.

I decided to take it upon myself, along with the artistic insight of the other members to design a unique lighting rig.

First up: Drum Set

The drummer, Josh, likes the idea of a kind of ambient glow coming from the drums. At first I was thinking of just using those bright LED strips you can get from Adafruit, but after some thought I'm too afraid it'll look like this rather than the desired glow:

Then I thought back to a video I saw a while back from the insanely talented Jeri Ellesworth, where she was experimenting with electroluminescent (EL) wire.

I'm thinking that EL wire will give the glow we want, but there's only one way to find out. The next installment of this series will focus on my first experiments with the EL wire.