Winter Buildoff 2022 - Outlaw Reborn

[Jon Clegg]

Body blank all marked up for cutting to shape:

And roughly cut to shape:

Right now the body at 1.75" thick, weighs about 9.3 lbs I'm going to shave off 1/4" of thickness which should lighten it a bit. It will have a spacious control cavity and some additional chambering under the PG.

Here's how things look with a bit of Naptha:

I've been spit-balling a few ideas for control configuration:

The front two knobs are pots for volume and tone, the rear two knobs would be rotary encoders. One of the toggles is to true-bypass the effects processor while the other two control in/out for each slot, there are also 2 pushbuttons, one of which could be used for tap-tempo for modulation effects

As for feedback, the Pollen synth module uses RGB LED's to indicate menus, etc, workable but would require memorizing what the colors mean. Another idea is to follow the example of the Illumine effects box and use a small LCD, but set in the upper arm.

 

[Jon Clegg]

OK time to cut the scarf. I promised @Gilmourisgod lots of photos, so here goes:

I use the table saw with a purpose-built jig. The jig is a 3/4" piece of MDF with a clamping fence made of 2 pieces of 2x2. I used the 2x2 as it's easy to things square.

I added an addition fence after I did a test cut and found myself getting a bit uneasy about the proximity of my hands to the blade:

To make the angled cut, I put a rail to fit in the mitre slot of the saw, for this jig I went with a tilt-back angle of ~9.5 degrees or a 1:6 ratio (remember your trigonometry! ) For ~8 degrees of tilt-back use 1:7. I drew a line across the MDF at the desired angle and attached the rail. Note that the ancient Delta (made by Ryobi) saw that I use doesn't have a std width T-Track mitre slot, so I use a piece fo 5/8" x 3/8" aluminum stock.

I also added a grip layer of sandpaper to the face of the fence to keep the blank from slipping while it's being cut:

I mark the neck where I want the 'exit wound' to be -- basically the length of the headstock:

Line that up with the mark I made on the jig:

Clamp it up, raise the blade to its maximum, make sure everything is square and run it through:

There's a tiny web left that I remove with a hand saw, any additional cleanup can be done with my planing jig

 

[Jon Clegg]

Forgot to add a pic of how it matches up to the 'exit wound' mark: within 1/8 of target.

 

[Jon Clegg]

Gluing up the headstock, Pegs for alignment:

Epoxy and clamps applied:

 

[Jon Clegg]

After a bit of screwing around... I got my tiny little display working, so I wrote a quick little splash screen:

 

[Jon Clegg]

While looking around on the Daisy forums, I found a multi-effects project that someone had posted there along with a link to the source code. Since the author had things pretty well worked out, I decided to adapt the infrastructure that he had developed. The controls will be 2 rotary encoders, 2 pushbuttons, and the two toggle switches. I'm setting the signal chain up for 4 slots, 2 of which can be active at any given time:

The encoder(s) are used to select the current slot, clicking an empty slot takes you to the effect selection window:

Clicking an occupied slot takes you to the parameters for that effect:

Now that I largely have the software under control, I can get back to making the bass to stuff it into.

 

[zorgzorg2]

Really cool! Can I ask what display it is you are using?

 

[Jon Clegg]

Sure, it's one of these: 0.96 Inch OLED display It's 128x64 pixels, I'm using the u8g2 library to write to it.

 

[zorgzorg2]

So cool! I've been wanting to try a daisy for a while, now I've got even more GAS...

 

[Jon Clegg]

So cool! I've been wanting to try a daisy for a while, now I've got even more GAS...

They have pretty good support. I'm prototyping on a Pod, I'll switch over to a PedalPCB Terrarium, with a daughter board to break out some of the pins the Terrarium board doesn't use.

 

[zorgzorg2]

Sounds like a great plan! Have you considered using a touchscreen?

 

[Jon Clegg]

Sounds like a great plan! Have you considered using a touchscreen?

I thought about it, even thought about doing something like a Kaoss Pad; but due to size, it would need to be on the top. Because of viewing angle, etc, you'd need to crane your neck, lift your knee, etc to see it. In the end, I decided that putting a display on the edge of the upper horn would work better.

 

[Flying B]

They have pretty good support. I'm prototyping on a Pod, I'll switch over to a PedalPCB Terrarium, with a daughter board to break out some of the pins the Terrarium board doesn't use.

This might as well be written in Swahili.

 

[Jon Clegg]

This might as well be written in Swahili.

Wana support nzuri sana. Ninatoa mfano kwenye Pod, nitabadilisha hadi kwa PedalPCB Terrarium, na ubao wa binti ili kuvunja baadhi ya pini ambazo bodi ya Terrarium haitumii.

 

[Flying B]

Well why didn't you just say that in the first place!

 

[Jeff Siddall]

Really interested in seeing this all come together in the bass. Daisy wasn't even on my radar until you posted about it but looks like a cool project!

 

[Jon Clegg]

Really interested in seeing this all come together in the bass. Daisy wasn't even on my radar until you posted about it but looks like a cool project!

Thanks! I was thinking about a using a Teensy but the Daisy has a better codec built-in.

 

[Jon Clegg]

Of course, now I'm thinking about how I can incorporate a touchpad in V2.0.

 

[Jeff Siddall]

Thanks! I was thinking about a using a Teensy but the Daisy has a better codec built-in.

Yeah, I never thought of Arduinos as usable audio processing devices, given the typically 10 bit ADCs and no DACs, but the Daisy has real (24 bit) codec and enough horsepower to do DSP work so interesting for sure.

 

[Jon Clegg]

Yeah, I never thought of Arduinos as usable audio processing devices, given the typically 10 bit ADCs and no DACs, but the Daisy has real (24 bit) codec and enough horsepower to do DSP work so interesting for sure.

Yeah, Teensy has an 16-bit codec on their audio board, and a pretty cool audio library. The Daisy DSP library looks like a port of the Teensy library (or was derived from the same source). The Teensy is a more general purpose device that people adapted to audio while the Daisy is purpose-built for DSP.