2009-07-29

iPhone Notes Typeface Revisited

2.2 on the left, 3.0 on the right. I don't know how it's possible, but they just made that Marker Felt font even uglier.

2009-07-11

TileMaker

I wrote a little Processing sketch which makes simple tiling patterns from a source picture. It's like Repper but not as good. See it here at OpenProcessing if you've got Java installed.

2009-07-10

Diffusion-Limited Aggregation

I've been playing around with Diffusion-Limited Aggregation in Processing. I've uploaded the sketches to OpenProcessing.org. You can see a very simple example here, and a more complex one here.

2009-07-01

Circuit Bending the Alesis SR-16


The Alesis SR-16 drum machine is a rewarding and easy target for circuit bending. Short different legs on the two chips ringed in blue (sample data ROMs) for some interesting sounds. Stay away from the corner pins - they're voltage supply and such. The science: you're performing a bit-munging across a specific range of the total sample resolution. However, the sample data isn't stored linearly, so it's actually affecting a different effective range according to how far you are through the sample playback.

Stay away from the chip circled in orange: it's a DAC which runs at higher voltages than the rest of the board, so you risk irretrievably damaging your machine if you fool around blindly connecting it up to things. Use a datasheet if you just have to play with it.

There's an excellent page here about bending the SR-16's older brother, the HR-16.

Things I plan to do:
  • Write a decoder for the sample ROMs
  • Maybe make a sample pack or two and a YouTube vid