Looks like Jarre’s currently playing throughout Europe as the start of his world tour.

Initial pictures indicate that he’s dropped the “keyboard” style laser harp and gone back to a vertical orientation. That means the power has to be cranked up again, and it’s back on with the oven gloves.

Looks like he might have lost a string too…

Pictures here

Don’t know about the power of that laser, but I would assume it’s a single scanning beam, of 1W+ maybe even 2W.

Finally got the bugs out of the system…

I now officially declare this project over.

Time to work on something new…

I just replaced the old 6v piston pump with a new 12v car washer pump. It has much more kick to it, but the problem is I’m going to need a bigger water tank.

I’ve been battling (for quite a while) with the steering controller for the full sized Dalek. I was shown these neat servo gearboxes from ServoCity.com. So I went ahead and ordered one for the HiTec 7955 servo.

The modifications to the servo were really very difficult to do, and I hope I never have to do it again! Next time I’ll be ordering one with the servo installed.

…and in the Dalek…

…and my first driving lesson. Speed set to *very slow*

All of a sudden my DRSSTC Tesla coil stopped working.

It took a long exposure in a darkened room to see the very faint corona around the top of the primary coil - that’s definitely not right.

Ooh that's not good

The coupling between the secondary and primary coils was too tight. So I rewrapped the primary coil tighter and lower than it was before, and that seemed to fix things.

Not sure why that suddenly started to happen, as it’s been working great for about a year.

I recently came across a bunch of 4093 chips:

The NAND chip - 4093

These are Quad NAND gates, with Schmitt trigger inputs. It turns out you can use these to make oscillators and monostables - just like the 555, but more compact with less parts.

Astable oscillator with a NAND gate

So I updated the oscillator application I wrote to calculate out values using this oscillator as well as a 555. It looks like you can get more of usable range with this device.

Now with support for the 4093 chip

One thing - the NAND gates cannot source as much current as the 555 timers so you might need to add an opamp as a voltage follower. LM324 does this nicely.

You can download the C# solution here.

One nice feature of the 555 oscillator is that you can connect another LFO signal to pin 5 and create a vibrato effect for even more ‘musicality’ - something lacking with the NAND gates.

X rated - Cor!

I just watched The Long Good Friday - I’d forgotten about the X classification.

That means it’s really, really good.

Or something…

…and I guess I use that term lightly.

I’ve been building a MIDI modulator for the DRSSTC tesla coil I put together last year.

One of the problems is tuning a 555 based oscillater to match MIDI note numbers. I played around with Excel for a while, but couldn’t really get anything useful going. So I wrote something in C# to help.

555 to MIDI calculator

This application calculates the frequency of a standard 555 timer in Astable mode based on the values of C, R1 and R2. I split R2 into a fixed resistance (R2a) and a variable resistance (R2b). R2b is controlled via the MCP42100 digital potentiometer that can be hooked up to an Atmel microprocessor very easily.

After calculating a set of frequencies for the 555 timer, it then goes on to calculate the set of frequencies for standard MIDI note numbers.

Finally it compares the legal MIDI note numbers to the table of 555 values, and comes up with the best match for each note in table 3.

I’ve not yet implemented the results in hardware to see how musical it sounds, but on paper it all seems to work well.

The application is a C# solution available here (also contains compiled runnable version).

Update; it does work!

Even thought the sound quality is very flaky - this first run shows the tuning is just about right.

I’ve been going through all my shelves in the basement and trying to complete as many of the unfinished projects as I can, just to clear some space.

One of the things I needed to do was box up the old Staco Autotransformer I have. I was faced with this:

Hmmmm...

But luckily I found Tim Reese’s webpage that explains how to hook the variac up for both 120/140v output.

http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~reese/VariacPage/

So that’s one more project finished.

Green for 120v and red for 140v

Yay!

Several years ago I asked my workmates the question:

“If a government needs more money, why can’t it just print more?”

We talked about inflation, and the linking money to tangible assets like gold, but soon realised that we didn’t have enought information to come up with a good answer.

I recently saw the “Money As Debt” video on youtube - if you’ve not seen it then I urge you to take about an hour of your time to view the whole thing.

Here’s part one (of 5):

I have no way of really verifying the information presented in the video, but it makes for compelling viewing. I can also see how an economic system like this could have evolved.

So far I’ve talked to 3 tellers and two bank managers - I asked them “When I get approved for a loan, whose account is debited when the credit is made to my account?”

No one knew where it came from - just from “The Bank”. When I told them about the idea of the 9:1 lending ratio, nearly all of them said “I can believe that”.

The longer I live, the more I come to believe that “Do what you want, just don’t get caught, shall be the whole of the law.”