James TYRRELL

The ESP8266 is a budget-friendly MCU. You can pick up a development board for less than the price of a sandwich. And in this case, it even includes a built in OLED display. Nice. Getting the board up and running was relatively straightforward. The…

KDE Plasma running on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed continues to impress, especially as it plays nicely with plugdata. And that means we can compile and upload our pd patches onto the Daisy Pod.

When a book makes you want to plot a graph, you know that it's a good read. And the name of the book? 'Chaos: making a new science' by James Gleick -- a non-fiction classic.

Pure Data (Pd) is an amazing programming canvas for creating sonic machines. And Plugdata takes care of shipping that code onto standalone devices such as the Daisy Pod -- if you can get the tool up and running. I couldn't get the application to play…

It's useful to have a few push buttons, LEDs, pots, etc... when prototyping embedded audio ideas, and that's exactly what Electrosmith's Daisy Pod gives you -- plus an encoder. That being said, it's been a bit of an adventure uploading files. But…

I bought the DSO 138 Mini -- available as a kit from JYE Tech -- a few years back and it's still going strong. The tiny digital storage oscilloscope is a bargain at around GBP 35 and useful for visualising synthesizer sounds. For the price, the…

Field test mode -- which is accessible by typing *3001#12345#* on your iPhone's keypad -- is a secret door to hundreds of mobile phone measurements. Received signal reference power (RSRP) and received signal reference quality (RSRQ) can give you a…

MobMuPlat -- made by Daniel Iglesia -- does a splendid job of converting Pure Data (Pd) patches into iphone apps. Step one, design your GUI using a drag and drop tool written in Java, which runs great on MX Linux. Step two, test your Pd patch in the…

I've started exploring Pd. The dataflow programming environment is an inspiring place to be. And the more you learn, the more fun you can have generating and processing audio signals. Today's adventure involved making fire -- or more accurately, the…

Both of my sonic machines have MIDI input ports, which got me thinking about the MIDI protocol and writing some code as a foundation for generative machine music. And, guess what? If you've got a Teensy microcontroller development board (version 3.2,…

There's so much to explore on this theme and a sound source and a sampler will take you far.

There are many amazing books out there. Here are some insightful reads that have crossed my path recently, with a few words on how they have changed my world. Also, you can tell a lot about a person from the books they read - so, if you're visiting…