One particular of our most loved musical hackers, [Look Mum No Computer] is acquiring dangerously close to developing a personal computer. His quest was to produce a special drum machine, impressed by a Soviet car-dialer that used rope core memory for quantity storage. Rope memory is the go through-only sibling to magnetic core memory, the memory technological innovation utilised to construct some beloved pcs back in the 60s and early 70s. Rope core isn’t programmed by magnetizing the ceramic donuts, but by weaving a wire by way of them. And when [Look Mum] observed the automobile-dialer utilizing the know-how for a user-programmable interface, by natural means, he just had to establish a synth sequencer.
The fundamental engineering is to observe the ferrite ring employing a most important winding connected to a comparator. Then operate the sign wire by some of the rings, and use a 555 to send out an oscillating sign as a result of it. The individual bits, AKA ferrite rings, choose up the sign and cause the comparator. (Applying transformers as bits, what exciting!) So for a operating sequencer, each and every ferrite ring controls an instrument. Ring 1 is a kick drum, ring 2 is a snare, and many others. Then each individual wire is a unique move, and they get driven sequentially. Wire the bit outputs to your instruments, and then weave your beats. It is presently the most distinctive sequencer we’ve ever seen, but there is a lot more.
Because he utilized actually huge ferrite cores, there was a lot of space to choose beat submissions from his local community, so there’s eight distinctive beats “programmed” into this sequencer. And to swap among them? Appears to be like [Look Mum] is employing a action-by-move module from the outdated cell phone procedure. Dial-a-beat!
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