The last month has been a little uneventful because I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for boards to show up. It seems that Chinese New Year can have serious effects on your work schedule. That said, I’ve been able to get some stuff up and running over the past week, so I’m back in business.

New CV controller board

As of Saturday, the new CV controller board has been delivered and assembled. I’ve also had a little time to write some code for it, which I will demonstrate below.

Notice that there’s a small error on the board that I’ve patched up with a jumper. I’m using a very nice, fast, easy-to-use quad DAC which has a weird quirk about it: It has an internal voltage reference of 2.44 volts, which doesn’t work well for us here. I cut a connection and soldered a new reference to the 5V rail.

What does it do?

Right now, it doesn’t do an awful lot, but it has loads of possibilities. I’ve programmed it to control my tiny modular rig. I’ve got it running the Erica Synths Pico Drum machine, as well as a VCO from Intellijel and a VCA from Mutable Instruments. My only regret now is that I’ve only put 4 DACs on the board. I wish I had 8 or 12. Next version?

So, let’s see it?

Below, see a kind of low-quality video of it controlling my little Pico rig. It creates a surprising amount of music for such a little setup.