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These were all taken from Skynet, which uses a set of robotically-controlled telescopes in the U.S., Canada, Chile, and Australia. We got several minutes of access for our astronomy labs this semester. Most of them are fairly ordinary objects, and I haven't done any color images yet, but I have some time left now that I've gotten all the required images, and I plan to do at least one color nebula photo.

These aren't all the images I got ... the asteroid photos aren't exactly fun to look at (or analyze, holy crap).

Jupiter:



The moons aren't visible when the detail of the planet is, so if you want to see where the moons were in that photo, I labeled them here.

I also got two pictures of Uranus with four of its moons (I got very lucky -- it's hard to get a photo of Uranus), but again, not very exciting to look at.

The fun ones are the deep sky objects!

The crab nebula:


A portion of the giant Carina nebula, with the keyhole visible.



NGC 5128, an eliptical galaxy that consumed a spiral galaxy in its past. This is my desktop image currently! I'm also doing a project on similar galaxies to investigate the rate of star generation. (Consuming another galaxy jumpstarts additional formation.)



And three spiral galaxies, NGC 1365, Messier 66, and Messier 96.

This was neat.

We don't have a "what are you reading" thread. Let's do it!

I don't get a lot of recreational reading time right now, but I finished Squirrel Girl up through the current trade paperback. Best. Superhero. Ever. If you have ever liked comic books or laughing, please read them!

Also got a fun math book for my dad for his birthday, "Things To Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension" by Matt Parker, which I'm trying to survey before I hand it off to him. Non-recreational right now is mostly math stuff.

Must be a couple dozen 2N1305 in a brief shot a few minutes in.

This guy is one of the weirdest people Numberfile interviews on the regular, and since they interview mathematicians, that's saying something ...

http://cosmicwatch.lns.mit.edu/detector#steps

This is hilarious. It lights up every time a muon (a high-energy cosmic ray, basically a psychotic electron) passes by.

Requires some arduino but all the code is in Python.

Now the question is: Does it come in pedal form?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/paisley-park

I was expecting some small building in the back of his house or something, but, nope, it's the size of a frigging mall.

All that space and the vocals were still done in the control room.

"Fully integrated circuits printed directly onto fabric" from the University of Cambridge.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/fully-integrated-circuits-printed-directly-onto-fabric

A stretch for a pedal forum, but too awesome not to share.

This is a computer. On a breadboard.

There are also videos where he loads machine code into the breadboard computer.

He's also got some interesting videos on digital electronics, including a good explanation of using transistors, which might come in handy for anyone looking to explore transistor switches in their pedals (like what Merlin uses in a lot of his ... and Boss).

I will not be making a perfboard layout, sorry.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/an-ai-invented-a-bunch-of-new-paint-colors-that-are-hilariously-wrong/

Look at the second to last color! LOOK AT IT!!!!!

A friend forward this to me:

(admin: link removed)

Have fun!

My dad forwarded me this.

Curious what a standing wave is? Didn't pay attention in physics class? Want to make an LED levitate?

I've been using this for years to share all my layouts and schematics.

I really don't want to do the tedious work of migrating all my images to a new host but I guess I have to. Dropbox's best feature was that if I replaced a file with the same file the URL stayed the same, which isn't true for things I host on my Wordpress sites or, I think, for Google Drive.

Anyone have a good solution?

(I just noticed that Rej's build docs are hosted on Dropbox, too.)

I wasn't FAWMing this year (I'm supposed to be producing a couple friends' albums, though that hasn't happened as consistently as was planned), but I got a few songs out anyway.

Out of My Mind -- classic country

If We Drown or If We Burn - folk rock with a bunch of slide

(We've Gotta) Try - soul rock.

Keming - a little song about the importance of clear font faces.

Track 3 (which was actually the fourth song, but it's more fun to end with Keming) is probably the best mix of the four. #2 still seems a little muddy to me, so any suggestions on the mixes are welcome.

I might not be 100% done with the Snow Day, but it won't look any different if I change it:



This is most likely going to a local guitarist, but he needs to test it out first.

I made a couple tiny refinements while building this one, like C8 and C11 can just be 22nF, not 220nF, and D1 (the compression rectifier) can't be a 1n5817 apparently because it's too leaky. (I suggested some fixes in the build thread for anyone who's interested, but the easiest if you're building Brian's stock version is to replace the 5k6 right before the tone control with a 22nF or larger cap. You lose a tiny bit of available cut but it solves the entire issue without having to buy other diodes.)

The bass control is courtesy of Brian's addition of a HPF right before the gain control, R4 and C4. Although Brian's build doc (at the moment) kind of misstates what these are doing (they're cutting 1.5dB below 68nF, whereas the original was just a straight HPF), I'm glad they're there because they're an opportunity to easily add a bass shelf. I used a 1MC and a 1nF, which gives 12dB of control below 318Hz. It's not extreme but it's definitely noticeable. Just not sure I'd really put it on another build if my friend hadn't specifically mentioned wanting a bass control. It's also sort of philosophically weird for the design since it's not like a tweed Deluxe had a bass control, but anyway. The rest is basically stock to my schematic.



The order was for a regular Bearhug, but the customer uses an archtop and a tele with a Charlie Christian pickup. Since archtop + Bearhug is a recipe for distortion, I did some testing and found that a high pass filter on the front end fixed a lot of the issues, like triggering the compression too hard and overdriving the mosfet. I put a -3dB pad at 200Hz (2M2 with a 150pF in parallel) and a -6dB pad at 150Hz (4M7 with 220pF in parallel) on the front of the circuit with little dip switches to simply bypass them. They're just between the switch and the board input.

This gave me some ideas for doing a friend's build, too.

Cross posting this from DIYstompboxes ...

I was building a Flabulanche, which is a circuit I ... know pretty well

http://www.madbeanpedals.com/projects/Flabulanche/Flabulanche_2015.pdf

Schematic page 4.

I ordered a pile of this diode, 1N5817G from Mouser:
http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?r=863%2d1N5817G

Datasheet:
http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/308/1N5817-D-103200.pdf

I've been through the datasheet and I can't find anything that tells me what the "G" suffix means, but I wouldn't have expected it to cause any issues. I mean ... it's a diode, right? In any case, I didn't give it a second thought when I was ordering it.

It works perfectly fine for the charge pump part of the circuit. I get my normal voltage at the end (17.7).

The place where I'm having trouble is the D1 rectifier. (For clarity, this rectifies the output of Q3 and puts a negative voltage on the gate, dropping the gain.)

There's some positive DC on the cathode of the diode (about 3.3V, from the gate bias for Q4). Normally that's not an issue -- I grabbed a previous build and there's no DC on the anode. But that build had a different diode.

On this build, when I flipped the switch, I've suddenly got a bunch of positive DC on the anode! Quite a bit of it, too -- about 2.3V.

So I grabbed a 1N60P out of the stash, pulled the 1n5817 and replaced it ... and the DC is gone. There's the tiniest bit of leakage across it, but that's it.

I doubled checked and none of the 1N5817 are bad or measuring something they shouldn't. My multimeter's not reading anything from cathode->anode for Fv. There shouldn't be enough current or voltage to hit any reverse breakdown or anything like that.

Just to make sure, I tested one of the 5817 in the previous build, and they cause the same problem. I tested every other diode I have at home and no other diode causes the issue. It's just this baggie of 5817Gs. I don't have any other 5817s to test, but I have 50+ other types of diodes and I can't find any others that malfunction in this way.

I popped one of the 5817 in a quick test circuit (just a load and a DC input). They block DC flipped around backwards like they're supposed to and drop .2V again like they're supposed to. So they diodes don't appear to be bad.

What am I failing to consider here? Is there something unusual about the "G" designation of the 5817 that's causing this unique problem?

Has anyone else had an issue with a 1N5817 causing their Flabulanche to malfunction?

Apologies in advance for the potato-quality pictures. It was cloudy.

Erin Frisby and her husband/musical partner (Miss Shevaughn and Yuma Wray) moved back to DC recently. They're in the process of reinventing themselves into a kind of 90's-ish noise rock thing with some modern electronic elements (Fuzzqueen). In part I think Erin was tired of being referred to as "the singer" even though she played a lot of the lead guitar.

She's a pretty big gearhead. Chris owns a Multiplex/Fatpants combo I made (the Joshua Tree Delay), but I never really was sure what to make Erin until they started this project. The obvious answer was fuzz. I also knew that she liked some glitchy stuff, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't duplicating something she already had, so I built her a Rust Bunny after taking a peek at a picture of her current board. Then I mailed it to her in secret (I got her address from a bandmate.) She was really surprised and said she put it on her board right away.



Again, sorry about the pictures. I cleaned them up as much as I could. The colors look almost neon in person.

This is the output buffer version; I used the 500K tone pot instructions, so it goes from super incredibly buzzy to full beefy. (Side note: I tried the input buffer but quickly removed it. I'm not really sure why I ever thought it was a good idea, or necessary.)

Lexa and I are going to Hawaii again this year, big island this time, in October. We'll be in Seattle for a couple days (a Tuesday and Wednesday I think).

Anyway, last year I managed to set up a show in Portland, and that was fun, and I'd like to set one up in one of these areas, but I don't really know many people out that way. (I actually did have a couple friends in Portland.)

If anyone knows any really froody folks or is a froody person themselves in these locales and can think of a musical home for a folk singer, please let PM me. We'll have a car in Hawaii, so location doesn't matter, but not Seattle.

We'll also be in Honolulu for a couple days.

Someone wanted a Twin Peaks but they aren't buyable anymore, so I agreed to use one of the handful of leftover TT Cardinal boards and build him something cool. It's got a switched expression jack for either depth or rate (selected with the 3PDT) and a tone control based on the Garnet tacked onto the end, which works like a tilt tone for ~1KHz. It's a 20KW pot, a 47nF for the treble cut, and a 470nF for the treble boost. It's not 100% neutral at the center of the knob, but it's not too far off.

Problems encountered:
I had a bunch of ticking and was able to kill it by jumpering the power supply filter resistor and putting a 100uF from 5V to ground (that's what's going on with the cap on the expression jack).

Also had a dud vactrol, which was not fun to replace

Believe it or not the pedal worked before I took this picture. If you spot the problem, you win 2 interweb points.



Chris Freeland (the engineer at Beat Babies Studios I do all the Midway Fair albums with) took a liking to the Little Buzzy Fuzz (mini buzzaround) I left at his place but needed something more robust. (I think the LBF has one of those bad lumberg clone jacks in it) and asked me to make him a more robust one. So I made this. I added the volume control by replacing the 10K to ground at the output with a 10K pot, and then replaced the Timbre pot with a 100KC wired as a variable resistor and then used a 1uF instead of 100nF for the "big" cap. This makes it so that the output loading and cutoff frequencies are identical to the original without the volume pot and also corrects what would be a problem where the timbre pot would have less volume in the center of its travel than to either side. I'd actually highly recommend this in general as a way to build the pedal.

I also used the 10K bias pot, but dropped the 27K to 18K to get a slightly higher maximum voltage on Q3.

Q2 is a very low-gain button silicon transistor (2N5134, but it could be lots of stuff), which I've found can really really reduce the noise on this pedal without altering the tone or hunting for an impossibly low-leakage pair of Ge transistors. Interestingly the design is actually quieter with a germanium in Q1 than both being silicon. Q3 is an MP38A just like the previous build. These tend to have consistently good-but-not-too-much leakage (you need some leakage for Q3 to work right but it's not picky otherwise).

Overall it sounds pretty good. I don't have the little one to compare, and it's still not my favorite fuzz, but I think it's definitely a good sounding one.

I went a little more cartoony with the graphics this time. I still really like my other build's picture better, but this was cute enough.

I've narrowed this down to a combination of power noise and current draw from the TAPLFO chip.

I was building another Tap Tempo Cardinal today and I ended up with the dreaded ticking in square wave. Hadn't experienced this with the first build, so this was a good time to look for a solution.

The first thing I did was start poking around with a cap. I strapped a 100uF across the +5 to ground and that killed some of the noise.

The Tap Tempo Cardinal has a 47R as a filter resistor. I jumpered this and it killed most of the noise on its own even without the cap. I've updated the build doc for that.

I suspect that jumpering R15 in the twin peaks might help as well. Someone else who has one built might want to experiment.

Streaming on Bandcamp and you can take it home for name your price, including free.

These are the 13 songs I wrote during February (#14 was just a guitar part on a friend's song), recorded in the library and then obsessed over for 15 days after.

http://baltimericana.bandcamp.com/album/the-howling-tongue-of-each-other

It starts on track 5 due to the weird way feature tracks work, so if you want to hear the whole thing, hit back a few times.

Although this is the final version, and I've done my best to achieve the sound I wanted by comparing on as many sound systems as possible, I'm not a professional audio engineer and certainly not a mastering engineer, so if you have any suggestions for future improvements in my mixing techniques, please let me know.

I was very, very skimpy on interesting guitar effects this year. In fact, the only deviation from my standard 6-pedal gigging board -- and I didn't even use everything on that -- was the use of a wah pedal for 30 seconds in the guitar solo at the end of track 4. I did use the preamp I designed and the mics I built quite a bit. I left the production notes out of the liner notes, but I will include them in blog posts on batches of the songs, so if you are the sort of person who gets excited about that, please subscribe to my blog (in my sig). I'm not doing anything super fancy, but there are at least three tracks where I did some unusual things. (The acoustic sound on track 4 in particular is almost certainly unique.)

My main bit of pride is that I think my vocals are finally getting close to what I want to sound like. Not every take is as perfect as I could have gotten it (I don't like doing that for FAWM albums since part of the point to me is to capture a moment), but I think I really nailed tracks 4, 5, 10, and 11.