Have you ever had to install a new version of OS X and then wished that you still had your old home directory?
Here is the method to do that, assuming that you still have your original OS X partition/disk, and that the new version of OS X is on a separate partition/disk…
Continue reading Retain your old home
Following on from Atari Punx…, a sequencer is a very useful piece of additional kit. One can be easily made using a 4017 decade counter.
As a follow on from Atari Punx… a home grown, simple, drum machine is required. We first thought that a 555 based drum machine would be nice, but a µController is required for sequencing really.
White noise generators are also looked at.
A friend of mine, Pavel, from the group Bang Sue Electrix, told me about the Atari Punk Sound generator. I’d never heard of it before, and I initially thought that he wanted to re-create either an old Atari VCS games console, or Atari 800 PC. When he showed me the Wikipedia – Atari Punk Console page, I realised that he was actually referring to a Stepped Tone Generator, formed from an astable square wave oscillator driving a monostable oscillator, (or – if you prefer – an astable multivibrator circuit triggering a monostable multivibrator circuit) which uses two 555 timers (or a single 556 timer IC)…
Reminiscent of vintage Atari video games, the synthesizer’s output is a characteristic Forrest Mims, a popular electronics author, published the original Atari Punk Console schematic for a “Sound Synthesizer” in Engineer’s Notebook: Integrated Circuit Applications and then a “Stepped Tone Generator” in Engineer’s Mini-Notebook: 555 Circuits. Kaustic Machines took the circuit and popularized their version as the “Atari Punk Console”.
This article also takes a look at some unrelated 4069 musical projects…
See also Banging noises… and Sequence Dancing.
I got an i-Box (v1) based robot for 100 baht. This robot is a PIC16C715 based device, with a dual motor driver, EEPROM serial memory and a comms IC, all mounted on a PCD a couple of inches square.
It has a number of variants, and brand names, such as:
These are essentially the same device.
It is quite difficult to locate any online information about the i-Box v.1, per se. Information on the i-Box III can be found online however,
I had some fun trying to get Cricket Logo to run on OS X 10.8.5, see i-Box, Cricket Logo and Arduino. The main issue was trying to get the RXTX Java files to be seen
Dig out Oolite, the Open source version of Elite. Currently at version 1.86, although I am running 1.80 (1.77), for reasons described below.
