fixed some old modules and made a new one!
yeah yeah we took some modules out of the rack (that we absolutely cannot find a picture of at the moment of writing) of modules and decided to give them a second look. see, we made 15 or so modules of very scummy quality, in the matter of two intense and obsessive months of electronics tinkering. all sorts of tinkering, but mostly CMOS tinkering. dirty modules the lot, but somewhat functional nonetheless. the scummy part about them was the fact that they were built without LEDs which made them very difficult to navigate. we accepted it for some time.
all modules in the picture above, except the hexidecimal terror synth, that is new, have had a LED mounted and holy fucking shit me jesus does it make a huge difference! this shit is actually starting to function as a modular synth. yay.
as stated above, we can’t post a picture of the old rack, but you can have an audio sample:
the hexidecimal terror synth thing was an improvised soldering jam session of some hours. it consists of one 40106 oscillator and a 16 channel multiplexer/demultiplexer chip, the 4067. it’s 24 pins so wow, we are stepping up a level. what happens is that the capacitor, that would be used to determine the pitch (along with a resistor or potentiometer) of the oscillator on the 40106, is selected by the multiplexer, the 4067. it is an oscillator with 16 capacitors, all of different capacitance. to be precise, we a talking a change in nanofarads from 100 or 2200000, or in microfarads 0.1 to 2200.
the selection of which cap to use is determined by the truth table but we didn’t any internal control, we just put S0, S1, S2 and S3 on the front panel and plugging signals into that will determine which channel (leading to a pitch-determining capacitor) to select, that could done precisely with constant high signals to the control pins,,, but we could also just plug in some LFOs running at differents speeds to get a pseudo-random pitch thing running.
borrowing from this idea, we think the 4067 with a 4040 to the control pins is another way to make a 16-step sequencer without having to cascade two 4017 chips together.
read more about the modules here.
