28 October 2009

Wogglebug (Part 2)

Today I finished the Wogglebug module I was building. I had some trouble drilling holes in the bracket that holds the PCB. It is some kind of very hard steel and it looked like it was as hard as my drills :) Now I bought a special set of super strong gold colored drills and with those it was no problem. After attaching the PCB to the bracket I started wiring the front panel components. Since there was no real construction manual I figured out what went where using the schematics I downloaded from the Internet. And then comes the always exciting moment of hooking the power up.

Well that all went well. The first thing to always check is if there is no smoke and if no components get really hot. I always switch the lab power supplies on with a very low current limit so that this should not happen anyway. But better safe than sorry. But OK. It all went well. Then I hooked up the oscilloscope to see if all the signals were coming out of the jacks and that all looked fine. The final thing I did was hook up a PC speaker to get some audio from it. And it started making weird noise right away. And that is what a Wogglebug is supposed to do :)

The final thing was to test all the functions. And only the 'cluster' function I don't understand. If someone can enlighten me please do :) But it is a very nice module. It is like a supercharged random module. I just called my two daughters downstairs to play around with the module and they had a lot of fun with it. I even managed to explain to them how sound is made en showed then on the oscilloscope what it looks like. Well for now I'm done with this module and I'm going to finish up another project. I have a lot lying around from last year.

Here is another close-up picture of the front panel. The only thing that is confusing in my opinion is that it is not very clear what are outputs and inputs. Actually there are only two inputs on the module: 'Clock' and 'Rate CV'. They can both be controlled externally. The rest are outputs were the upper row are CV outputs to control other modules and the lower row are audio outputs. So you can hook them right up to a speaker to get weird noises. Especially 'Ring Out' is nice since it is a ring modulated sound coming from it. Oh 'LFO out' is also an output and is actually the internal clock. When you connect a jack into the 'Clock' input it is overridden by the external clock you offer there. Well I'm going to play around some more with it and maybe will post some sounds later.

No comments: