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DIY Cheap-o Looper Effect

March 23, 2008 – 2:39 pm

… I’m surprised with what I’m able to do when I’m supposed to be doing homework.

Here’s my latest project, it’s less than 24 hours old =)

I’ve always wanted a looper effect, like the boss loopstation, mainly because the online demos were so neat. Being a bass player, I though it would help me practice with drum loops, but it’s just not worth the money unless you’re going to use it live. I ended up playing drum samples on my PC and playing along on the bass.

more (and video) after the break

Read the rest of this entry �

Posted in diy, guitar effects, proof-of-concept | 5 Comments »

[sic] - simple ipod converter

March 17, 2008 – 9:36 pm

…and why developing for Windows is not fun.

Behold, a one-click way to convert your videos to a format playable by your iPod!

[sic]
Well, here’s my latest project. I’ve started it to provide my sister with a simple way to convert her videos, so that she could finally watch them on her shiny 6G iPod.
The result is this simple ffmpeg frontend, built to run on Windows, with the goal of ease of use.

At this point it is rather limited, and I’m not sure if I will ever work on it again.
I’ve actually continued working on it after the uploaded build, but I have come to a dead-end with the Win32 API.
I chose to work with the bare API because I did not want to do it in C#, and, well, as far as I know, there are no many other options.

Why not C#? Even though the .NET Framework is widely available, I thought it was too much for a couple of buttons that launch an exeternal application.
I did not want to use MFC, because I’m unfamilar with it, and last time I used it it felt over-complex and messy. It also requires additional Dlls, or huge executable.

So Win32 API it was. I fired up Emacs (my new tool of the trade) and started coding.
As long as my code was a mess (i.e. C style coding, global vars etc ), everything was smooth and fun. I then wanted to add a system tray notification icon, and thought it would be
a good idea to create it inside a class, for use in later projects. This is where things started to break. I spent some hours researching methods to connect my window procedure to
members of my class. The solution involved an assembly hack. While interesting, I wanted nothing of it.

During my research, I came across WTL, which sounds just like what I was looking for. If/When I continue this project and/or develop another Windows application, it’s going to be in WTL.
Though I did find the lack of documentation annoying.

As a side note, I have to find out what utorrent used.

That’s it for now, hope someone will find it useful.

Posted in coding, ipod | No Comments »

Fender Jazz Bass Series/Parallel Pickups Mod

March 10, 2008 – 8:40 pm

I have just received a push-pull potentiometer that I had bought on ebay. It’s a hybrid between a potentiometer and a DPDT switch. It looks like this:

I installed it in my Fender Highway-1 Jazz Bass, in place of the regular tone potentiometer, and wired the switch part of it to change between two different wiring modes for the pickups:

• Parallel - Which is the default on the Jazz Bass. In this mode each pickup gets a volume knob.
• Series -Connecting the pickups in series, so that they act as one. This delivers higher gain out of the pickups, and a punchier tone. When in series mode, you only get one volume knob that controls both pickups.

I used the following diagram that I had found online:

It took me about 45 minutes to assemble, because soldering was a bit tricky, and I forgot one connection after fastening all the screws back.

I have no proper way to record my bass on the computer, so no sound samples for now. All I can say is that I’m very pleased with this new sound of my bass.  I still have to try it on a serious amp to get a better idea of the new tone.

If you own a Jazz Bass, not afraid to void your warranty, and can solder (or get someone to solder it for you), I’d suggest you to try this mod.

Posted in bass, diy | No Comments »

Chopper Tremolo Effect

March 8, 2008 – 11:50 pm

I’ve wanted to build this kind of effect for a long time. This was actually the reason I got my 4066 ICs half a year ago, when I visited my electronic components shop.

A Tremolo is an effect unit that modulates the amplitude of the guitar signal, usually in a triangular waveform. This version uses a square waveform, for a more switching, chopping kind of effect. This kind of effect can be heard in the beginning of Plant Telex by Radiohead. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine uses this kind of effect too, he, however, uses a “kill switch” on his guitar, which he controls manually.

More after the break…

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Posted in diy, guitar effects, proof-of-concept | 5 Comments »

Maxima Process Terminated in XP

March 6, 2008 – 10:35 am

This is a short post with a simple fix for fellow math students how failed to install wxMaxima on Windows XP.

I had downloaded the maxima installer from sourceforge, and it already contained the wxMaxima frontend.
After installing to “C:\Program Files\Maxima-5.14.0″ I tried to run wxMaxima but it failed to connect to maxima, while displaying the message “maxima process terminated” in the status bar.

Re-installing maxima and wxMaxima (using the same installer) in a directory that did not contain a space character (e.g. “C:\Maxima-5.14.0″) solved the problem for me.

I hope this sovles that problem for other users too.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

(Almost) Free MIDI Controller

February 25, 2008 – 10:31 pm

Well it’s about time that I posted something.

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me for help. He wanted to create something that will allow him to control all sorts of effects in Fruity Loops, like many available midi controller products. He was, however, looking for the cheapest solution, and suggested using an old keyboard as a controller.

As I was toying with MIDI and my Arduino at the time, and started messing around in Fruity Loops, I was able to come up with a quick and easy solution. I used code from the s2midi application, that I had known from my Arduino prototyping and another Code Project example about keyboard hooks in C#.

After around 10 hours of development I came up with a small application that catches all keyboard input using hooks (and does not pass them to other applications, to prevent collision with existing hotkeys), and generates MIDI control commands. MIDI Yoke was used to bridge my application’s output and FL’s input.

The application works by “emulating” knobs, with assigned keys to increment, decrement, maximize or minimze their values. It is also possible to choose different step sizes for inc/dec. Currently the knobs are “hardcoded” as they are needed for my friend’s modified keyboard controller:

He connected the keyboard via USB, alongside a normal keyboard, and is going to use the two to control Fruity Loops in real-time.

Here’s a screenshot of my app:

Although it may be a bit funny to post about this application without releasing the code and executable, I’d rather not do it at the moment, as it requires a bit more work. I did not aim for high code quality anyway, as it is one of my first C# applications.

I think this will turn out to a simple program that one could use to control music software better than a mouse, but still no match for a true hardware MIDI controller (which is one of the projects in my TODO list )

Posted in coding, diy, midi, proof-of-concept | 2 Comments »

Turn Your Electro-Junk into Art, Piven Style

December 6, 2007 – 2:39 pm

GarageGeeks is a notorious group of hardware hackers based in Holon, Israel. Among their projects is the famed Guitar Hero playing android. Besides creating cool projects, they also host various hands-on workshops every once in a while.

On November the 22nd, I attended my first workshop. From the Facebook invitation:

This Thursday - Nov 22nd @ 20:00 we’ll be holding a GargeGeeks Heads workshop - hosting by our dear friend and great artist Piven Hanoch (http://www.pivenworld.com/pivenWorld.html).

We’ll be all creating head shots from electronic junk we’ll each bring from his/her own little electro-junk yard (or living room….)

Come and build faces that: Interact, Talk, Move, Light & Vibrate or just look cool

Please bring electro-junk & some basic tools

At first I hesitated about “wasting” my precious junk on a piece of art that probably would not make full use of the materials (an old printer, 3 broken cdroms, a cordless phone etc). I discovered, however, that workshops such as that one, are truly inspiring. Even though I didn’t get to build anything advanced in terms of electronics, I did build stuff. I was being more creative and productive than I ever am when working alone in my basement on various projects *cough* delayed drum machine *cough*.

Me and my two friends - Amihai Neiderman and Nur Nachman Eytan - grouped together and built “The German Mouse”. It was created from an old motherboard, a portable cd player, an actual computer mouse, a piece of salvaged circuit that spoke out something in German and some random bits.

Here are some pictures from the event - served using ZFrame of ZShow.com:

And Here’s a video of our creation:

My lesson and message to fellow makers, tinkerers and others that are stuck on the “Design and Concept” phase - Get your tools and start to build stuff. Hands-on experience is super productive and inspirational !

Posted in diy | 1 Comment »

Amazon EC2 for Game Servers

September 30, 2007 – 4:23 pm

Amazon Web Services rock. They really do.

I was first introduced to AWS about half a year ago, but only recently have I started to use them. I work at www.zshow.com where we use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for hosting all of our pictures. While exploring AWS, I also encountered EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and was quite excited about the idea - it allows you to easily create virtual servers, at the equivalent of a 1.7GHz processor and 1.75GB RAM with a 250MB/s connectinon, and pay per hour of use. Possible uses are endless, as you basically get a virtual x86 machine that can do everything you wish.

Recently, I’ve started thinking about renting a game server for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars when it comes out. Then the other day, I thought that Amazon EC2 could be used to host a game server (along with TeamSpeak/Ventrillo, Web server, and whatever) and was eager to try it out. I googled it up and found some posts in blogs about how this could be done ( I wasn’t the first one to come up with that idea ). I gave it a go, and quite soon I had an ETQW server running. However, much to my discontent, Amazon is probably located at North America, thus I couldn’t get decent pings for an actual game server that I could use (250+). I still think that it should be quite usable for Americans though, and extremely cost-efficient for clan servers, mod teams and other people who wouldn’t like to have their servers on 24/7. In that case it is actually cheaper to just rent a server from some host.

I do recommend the Firefox EC2 Add-On anyone who would like to try it, as it makes usage of EC2 much easier, via a single GUI interface.

I really see much potential in AWS in general, and I also like the idea of using EC2 for game servers. I guess that if I lived in North America and had some time, I would have set up a website that sells on-demand game servers and uses EC2 as a backend.

Posted in aws, proof-of-concept | No Comments »

Tee Time

August 16, 2007 – 12:09 am

I like T-shirts.

I have several Simpsons and Family Guy ones that I wear quite regularly. I also like seeing people wear humorous t-shirts, but what I really enjoy is MAKING shirts.
Here’s my first design, created as friend’s birthday present. It contains an image of a kind of treat, (whose name in English I do not know) that is made up of two cookies with ice-cream in between. He really loves this thing, so he also liked the shirt.

My second design was created for myself, and have put much more time drawing it. I really liked the result so it was worth it:

Next, I created two more designs, along with another shirt designed by a friend, for my cousin’s birthday. He’s an aviation freak, so that was the theme:

Last, but not least, a design that I had printed on an apron for another friend’s birthday present:

And that’s it for now. I had some other ideas, but nothing good enough to print. I guess I can post here when I print more, so that my single reader could enjoy it

I hope that writing more random, non-tech posts such as this will help me write more in general.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Long time no post

July 9, 2007 – 5:13 pm

As if I have any readers that care

Found out that some people have arrived to this blog by searching “python time measurement” and other things in google, got me quite motivated (more than the following poster did)

Anyway, I’ve started working on a PIC microprocessor based drum machine ! More on this soon…

Posted in contentless | 1 Comment »