Back in April of 2016, I heard the 99% Invisible Podcast about speech synthesizers. It was an enlightening look at Bell Labs Voder, the first speech synthesizer, which debuted at the Worlds Fair, in 1939. We had speech synthesizers back in 1939! But most of this episode was dedicated to SIGSALY. This was the codename…
Category: Electronics
Arp Odyssey Repair – Part Two
Continued from Part One. Next step in the repair was to either replace or repair the 4023 filter. I wasn’t actually sure if it was broken or not, but thought it would be worth replacing the chips and capacitors anyway. On reviewing the schematics for board C, I confirmed that the high output line had…
Bell Labs Speech Synth Kit
2018 has been the year of my obsession with speech synthesizers. I’ve been experimenting with the Ginsing/SoundGin IC for awhile and recently created my own eurorack-based synth module. In researching speech synth chips, I came across a very cool Bell Laboratories Speech Synthesis Kit, from 1963, on Ebay. A little beat up, but never put…
Arp Odyssey Repair – Part One
Many years ago, I had repaired a few synthesizers for Bon Harris of Nitzer Ebb. Being a huge fan of theirs I took the opportunity to do the best I could and managed to fully repair a few of them. I managed to repair a very broken EDP Wasp (still my favorite synthesizer), Sequential Circuits…
Wireless Power Transfer
I don’t remember how I got it, but I’ve had this old project my Dad built back in his college days. He built it as an experiment in wireless power transfer, or WPT. From Wikipedia “WPT is the transmission of electrical energy without wires as a physical link. In a wireless power transmission system, a transmitter device,…
UL Fire Extinguisher Simulator
This was the very first project which helped me start my company, M1 Interactive Inc. It was designed to teach kids and adults (but mostly kids) how to properly use a fire extinguisher using the acronym PASS. The client, Underwriters Laboratories, in Northbrook, IL wanted us to create a simulated environment, which would catch on…
Autodesk Eagle
I have been wanting to create my own PCBs for years. I tried many times to do this by etching my own, but with anything more complex than simple circuits, it requires a minimum of a two sided board. This requires a lot of work and planning to etch, which for me was not in…
Crypto Currency Meter
I jumped on the crypto bandwagon awhile back and for fun, wanted to build a cryptocurrency analog meter to gauge how much money I was losing every day. Using my past experience with the 8266 chips in my LED Cloud project, I thought this would be EASY. Not the case, it seems. As usual, working…
Alexa Activated LED Cloud
For my Grandson, I set out to build an LED cloud, mostly based on this Sparkfun tutorial. It was overall pretty easy to build as I had some Chinese lanterns, LED strips and an extra Arduino. The most difficult part of the project was attaching the pillow stuffing to the Chinese lanterns. The first…