I made one earlier this year and I love it! Good luck!
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Only things left to do are mount some LED tape inside the reflector, and be Dean Stockwell.
EDIT: picked up a nice pair of 24u Hammond rack rails on eBay for $20, so I guess the next thing is to make a rack so I can get rid of the beat up 12u SKB case that I’ve been using (and free up the nice, rolling kitchen cart it’s on for holding video stuff).
EDIT 2: finished up a Systech Harmonic Energizer clone today. Sounds amazing. Started out intending to do it point to point on perfboard but ended up getting an AionFX PCB since they’re only $12 and it saves some hassle wiring up the off-board parts. Sounds amazing.
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Seriously amazing.
I’ve been doing more unpacking and I had almost forgotten that back in 2011 I picked up a new-old-stock (open box) Via EPIA M10000 mini ITX motherbord with the composite and s-video option installed, RAM, and 1394 breakout cables/panel for 30 bucks on eBay. I’ve got quite a few things I need to do first, but at some point this year I’m going to finally get a MiniITX case and small hard drive and get it up and running. I remember reading that it has issues with early Windows versions (it was designed for Windows XP and Linux according to the manual) but it should still be useful for running low overhead 90s software like that Peter thing I found the other day (which I’ve been poking around with a little in my spare time, and so far it’s even more promising than I expected) and running it through the video rig when that’s back together (which will also be a while, although progress is being made).
The original plan was to use it as a dedicated Seer Systems Reality machine, but I’ve got a feeling it won’t work well or at all for that, since it’s legendarily picky about what hardware it’s running on (and only works with Windows 95 and maybe original - NOT SE - 98).
If nothing else, there was an old, freeware, generative video program called BOMB that is more or less impossible to search for (but I’ve got a copy on a hard drive somewhere), ran fullscreen with no UI, completely keyboard driven, and worked under everything from DOS (IIRC) up to at least Windows 7, so that would be pretty fun to throw in. I remember it being very playble.
EDIT: actualy, I already had BOMB on my laptop, here it is:
EDIT: I’ve had no issues with this since I downloaded it in the lat e90s, and none of the antivirus and antimaware programs I have installed detect anything, but one user below had it flagged by their antivirus so fair warning that something could be up. It’s tough to know with old software, the heuristics modern antivirus use don’t always understand Windows 95.
bomb-1.28.zip (2.6 MB)
I remember Gephex being pretty rough on the Pentium III I had the last time I actually tried it so I don’t expect it to run too well on a MiniITX from like 2005 but it could be an option, too.
Nice one.
i am finally trying out incorporating live liquids into a video performance!
many shout outs to @LiquidLightLab for leading a workshop on them at Phase Space and also providing us with a bunch of materials.
@andrei_jay took this video during our practice for performing at an upcoming show at phase space…
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Makes me wish I didn’t give away my overhead projector.
You’re braver than I am playing a show in Brooklyn right now. All it took for me to get Covid was forgetting my mask one time when I went to pick up a calzone last week, and I’m only in Providence.
I should start doing EBM so I can play shows in a gas mask.
I’m getting some virus alert from trying to download BOMB… not sure what’s up!
I scanned it beforehand and I jsut checked again. Kaspersky and Malwarebytes both show nothing, for what that’s worth. It’s freeware that was downloaded over 20 years ago and lived on CD-R for mos tof the time since then, so I guess it’s possible it has a very old virus but unlikely it has anything enwer than Windows 2000 and I’d be very surprised if modern antivirus software didn’t detect it.
What DOES come up as trojans are some of the example projects (but not the actual main application) in that PETER program I linked. I have a feeling it’s actually the network code (some of the examples actually have peer-to-peer, online multiplayer!) but I deleted them from my download just to be safe.
It can be hard to know with old software, in my experience at least modern virus scanners sometimes give false positives with Windows 95/98 stuff, but I’ll definitely add a note to my original post or delete the uploaded file if people think that’s appropriate!
EDIT: I did a full system scan with both of my main antivirus/malware scanners and Kaspersky didn’t find anything. All Malwarebytes did was report Process Hacker (a completely legitimate, open source tool) as malware.
Been pretty burned out on digital stuff lately but here’s a little something.
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Put a new power supply in the Juno 6 while the old one was still working fine, rather than waiting until something terrible happened.
It’s hard to tell for sure, but it seems like I only need the master volume up about 2/3 as high as I did before to get a comparable level, which is a nice bonus.
Incidentally, people always talk about how important it is to clean the flux off your boards after you build something, but I don’t really sweat it too much and here’s one of the reasons why:
I didn’t have to take the mainboard out today, but when I installed a MIDI retroft a few years ago I did and the bottom is WAY, WAY worse. It looks lke they just flooded the whole thing with flux, assembled it, and then put it in without any cleaning at all. It’s been working fine for 40 years so far, and the previous owners weren’t exactly gentle with it.
It’s hard to see, but even the calibration trimmers have dried flux on them.
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Lil vid I quickly put together last week w some wjmx feedback, syntonie cbv001, and a canon elura camcorder (that’s creating the sphere and wave effects) !
Toys are “puppeteered” by me, I added another old piece of glitch footage pip in the shot, and I made the text in paint3d.
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Hundreds of breaks
Slowly getting the video setup back on its feet. The FFG enclosure from Ponoko should be waiting when I get home today, but the spacers are still on order because of course all the spacers I had on hand are either 1mm too short or 1mm too tall.
It’s mostly down to figuring out how to fit it all onto one small table and a keyboard stand (and building a tall rack for my music gear so I can free up the table the 12u case I’m using now is sitting on, so I can free up the keyboard stand that the video mixers are on) and then patching everything together (i.e. finding out I need a bunch of new BNC to RCA cables probably, because everything I have now is either really short or 2+ meters long, and neither will work well the way I’m setting it up now).
Putting a ZuluSCSI in my old MPC and then figuring out the best way to get samples back onto it from the computer (it’s possible, but every method has drawbacks so I need to try them all and see which one is least bad - they’re all better than 20 year old 1gb CF cards that are all starting to fail and are too expensive to replace, especially since the replacements are just as old).
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…as i could not join in to the ambioSonics august session (ambioSonics - electronic music from Munich) for live visuals we plan to release a few tracks on Youtube from that session with ‚live visuals‘ added to them - here is the first one:
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I’m entirely new to the world of video art, so I’ve just been working on learning all the tools of the trade. My main objective is to turn all my music into an audio visual experience. So far i’ve explored 3 categories: manipulation of analog and digital signals with hardware gear (VSERPI, Roland V8, circuit bent video enhancer), 3d animation with blender, and projection mapping with touch designer. I mainly work with midi enabled music gear, so control of the V8 and video_Waaaves from my music setup is my primary focus right now. My ultimate goal is to compose with audio and video simultaneously. The digitakt from Elektron has proven to be the perfect interface for this. Being able to control things using parameter locks and lfo’s over midi is awesome!
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Don’t forget about DMX, you can control light with your Digitakt if you have a MIDI to DMX interface:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Obey40--chauvet-dj-obey-40-192-ch-lighting-controller
You then control the lights by plugging them into a dimmer pack:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/DMX4--chauvet-dj-dmx-4-4-ch-dmx-dimmer-switch-pack
The dimmer pack is connected to the Obey 40 via DMX. So you would have: lights > dimmer pack > Obey 40 > Digitakt. When you send a Midi signal from the Digitakt to the Obey 40, it will convert it to DMX signal and send the DMX signal to the dimmer pack. The dimmer pack will turn off, on or dim the lights which are plugged into it. Using an oscillator from the Digitakt you can even have the lights dim from bright to low and low back to bright if you wanted. Also, the cool thing about dimmer packs is you do not have to plug just lights into them. Try other things, record players, a toaster, televisions… You can use it as an on and off switch controlled from the Digitakt!
Good luck on your adventures!!
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Thanks! That’s another world I’ve always wanted to demystify. I’ve seen some pretty incredible light shows at concerts before, and always wondered what the hell was going on behind the scenes. Midi is such an awesome technology. Controlling synths is cool enough, but now I totally want to find out what its like to control a toaster like a musician.
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…i had the need for an eurorack-module that converts 0-1V CVs from video modules to 0-5V CVs…
…as i could not find any ready-made-module for sale (like LZX Bridge or LZX Voltage Bridge or one of the other modules that had been available a (very) few years ago) i tried to make my own…
…and actually succeeded - with a lot of help that is; the thing is based on the LM324 which hosts 4 converters in one IC - here is the schematic of one converter:
…here is what it looks like at the moment - not nice, but it works:
…todo: frontpanel and a means to attach the PCB to that front somehow…
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not to dissuade you from DIY but https://www.videoheadroom.systems/storefront/p/xfmr this would be a module that does what you want!
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…thank you for the tip! - unfortunately, like all the others it is ‚sold out‘…