Excuse the lack of formatting. I am, believe it or not, NOT a frontend engineer.
Rude...
If you're here you're probably checking out my engineering stuff. For those who aren't aware i'm an electrical eng / IT undergrad so as part of my 𝓮𝓶𝓹𝓵𝓸𝔂𝓪𝓫𝓲𝓵𝓲𝓽𝔂
i have to demonstrate I didn't cruise through 11 semesters of engineering school by consulting the great scribe of our era CHATGPT.
As part of this, i've decided to demonstrate my professional practice (and undiagnosed autism) by doing electrical engineering projects for FREE and UNPAID. Then publishing them to github. I also don't feel like writing a full repo for side projects sometimes, so i'll just write them up and put them here anyway if i don't think the work is particularily "showoffable"
I make music for fun, mostly trance but some other stuff every now and again. Check it out if you're interested
I thought it would be cool, to get motorised midi mixers that automatically intergrate with DAW APIs, since my preferred DAW (FL STUDIO) recently released theirs. Motorised pots by themselves aren't horrifyingly expensive (compared to what they cost in a prebuilt unit) and are otherwise pretty simple. Talking with fellow musicians they also voiced their interest and hence it became my big from the ground up project.
Its not a new concept, from what i've seen working in radio they're pretty much everywhere there, so i figure someones going to drop one sooner or later, but from what i've seen of the ones that currently exist they're both SUPER expensive and SUPER impractical for actual application, so they mostly get relegated to glorified paperweight and to flex on the music hoes.
I bought a Roland jv80 while i lived in austria, its in pretty bad shape [ i dropped it :( ] thanks to the almost 4 decade old red glue, barely holding on LCD and many other fun things that come along when something has been kicking for longer than i've been alive. Love its keyfeel though, i think and i massively respect its history so i've decided to repair it. HoW HaRD cAN iT Be????
Repair aside, which shouldn't be too bad and i'll post rough update posts here, i'm going to try modernise it to be a bit more user friendly in the modern sense. Aside from most likely changing out most of the user interface with new parts (switches, lcd, modwheel, not the keys though). I'm going to try to hack certain components with a new control layer. Likely, some VC-Resistors, logic gates to handle complex multi step inputs digitally, sidestepping the expansion card stuff (sorry roland if you're reading) so i can flash my own wavetables onto the oscillator. I'm not sure what the exact nature of this mod will be yet, but i'll put some time into it in my summer break most likely.
Because as an EE student i for some reason have too much time, and also because its fun to study with practice, i'm adapting the Erica Synths/Moritz Klein design for a simple, Diode bridge Op amp compressor into my own based on my industry experience on what makes a good, fun mastering compressor. Its my first time properly building audio signal processing hardware and i'm starting this project on the same timeline as my Signals 1 course, which is going pretty well so far thank you. Its a cool simple design, but since its designed at a general youtime watching audience it simplifies a lot of the concepts. I initially started this by just analysing the circuit and tearing it apart, seeing what makes it tick but as i simulated it i began to notice the shortcomings of such an approachable design. This is more or less an attempt to rectify these, explain a bit of the math involved and provide an alternative control circuit for what is essentially the same VCA module design.
In a bid to escape the dreaded engineer project pileup, i have BANNED myself from starting new projects unless i actually fully drop the old one for a good reason. I use to work on a ESP32 based tracker project, but since i was very new to C and did not spend enough time planning the project turned into borderline untestable mess. I'll restart that project at some point, but in looking back over the planning, that project was likely going to take 2 years off my life to complete, so i figured i'd rather not until i had a bit more experience under my belt with every module in that things design.
Otherwise, my planned projects for the future are:
look man elec eng and music take up 90% of my time cut me some slack, this stuff aint easy. I love signals though
Also like, this page is still super in progress so its almost definitely not working