Alton’s Status Reports

This week, I finished up assembling and soldering the second controller and middleman. I chose to solder the pulldown resistors directly to the button terminal this time, and just run three wires per button, rather than trying to save space

Integration The first controller is completely finished and functional! Here’s a video with a simple hardware testbench: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-t26AU67HpFWBi-JgGNCc6vKCYnEx1PV Soldering the pullup resistors in was a bit more of a pain than anticipated. I should have left more room between the

Controllers The laser cut pieces and hardware arrived this week so I was able to start building the controllers. Everything fits together surprisingly well for a first try. Here’s the pieces “dry-fitted” together with no hardware and no buttons: With

Controllers I spent most of this week designing the controller enclosure. We’re still planning to go ahead with our original plan of laser-cutting a box to house the controller, but doing so with an online service (Ponoko) rather than TechSpark.

Coming back from spring break, my main focus has been trying to work around the limitations that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to our fabrication. Our original plan for fabricating the controllers was to cut plywood using the TechSpark laser cutters.

This week I primarily focused on getting the sound module working in hardware. Our 8-bit DAC, 3.5mm stereo jack, and jumper wires arrived on Wednesday, so I breadboarded the audio hardware (as designed last week for the middleman board) to

Progress Audio I wrote a SystemVerilog testbench to test loading note data from a file and converting it to a waveform. The note data is stored in a simple hex format: all notes are on an eighth-note grid, and each