Monday morning François arrived with a lot of cables and some gunpowder. He wants to ignite small explosions from his computer via MIDI and make a sort of a pyro-organ. We tried to find ways to construct reusable electrical igniters. First idea was to use sparks, and the whole day he tried different means to […]

Sunday was not officially part of our research week, but Max was already here and we started working… I did some finishing touches on the videobass amplifier and repaired the second one – a dead Atmega16. I found that I can easily isolate the chip from the rest of the components by sticking some aluminum […]

Normally I was supposed to bring two of the videbasses to Paris this weekend – but I had to postpone it. Still not completely finished and to make things worse, I destroyed two of the screens by drilling through the led backlight cables. Stupid impatient me… So, while waiting for the replacement cables shipped by […]

The process is not photogenic, even Mohammed stopped filming after 2 minutes… Sanding with 60, 80, 120, 180, 220, 320,… until everything is smooth… red oil applied… and a little bit of sanding later:

Putting together the videobass neck and its body is not an easy task. The cutouts have to be quite precise and there are odd angles everywhere. The prototype body was too thin, about 35mm, and I cut out almost the whole depth of the neck, so the rest of the body was not really stable. […]

My vintage oscilloscope that I found fifteen years ago in a trash bin almost stole the show when we performed with the Synkie at Electron festival, Geneva, but it even stars in the latest ad for the Montreux Jazz Festival made by the nice guys from Horsform that are in the same building 😉 Funny […]

You can use the bootloader that is built into the uDMX to update its firmware to the latest version. Here’s a quick howto on MacOSX: 1. Install CrossPack CrossPack is a development environment for Atmel’s AVR® microcontrollers running on Apple’s Mac OS X, similar to WinAVR for Windows. It consists of the GNU compiler suite, […]

For the last two days I’ve been building the flight cases for the 3 videobass and 3 “amplifiers” with my father who helped a lot. We were so busy that I completely forgot to take pictures of the process. But the result is very nice: I really like the fact that we managed to have […]

Found this interesting application note “Microstrip and Stripline Design” http://www.analog.com/static/imported-files/tutorials/MT-094.pdf with a formula to calculate PCB traces to have a 75 Ohm impedance: For a given PCB laminate and copper weight, note that all parameters will be predetermined except for W, the width of the signal trace. Eq. 3 can then be used to design […]

Over the past few weeks – besides building the videobass prototype and starting to produce in series the parts that are clear – work has begun on the videobass “amplifier”. Unlike the videobass, where I only have to perfect things I didn’t like in the last version, this is a thing I build from scratch. […]

Tomorrow I’ll stop working on the bass for a moment and we’ll tackle the flight case for the videobass amplifier…

And here’s a picture of the three sisters: The original Videobass from 2003, the revision of 2007 and a still unfinished prototype of the 2011 series: