Buridan's Maker

There are times when being a Maker places one in the same hypothetical position of the donkey caught between two piles of hay, unable to decide which is closer.

You see a thing that looks cool and think about buying it. But then you realize that -- thanks to the skills and tools you've accumulated -- you could make your own. So you circle around that for a while.

Building it isn't a neutral proposition. Is owning the thing worth the time and resources you'd have to invest in building one? Perhaps not. So time to reconsider purchase. Well, since you've now re-valued how much it is actually worth it to own the thing, and you have to subtract the added value of increasing your skills and, of course, that it would be fun to build, maybe it isn't worth buying either.

No matter how long you chase this one around the circle, you still end up stuck between two piles of hay.



(Yeah, I want a hand drum. I have a decent bodhran and a cheap darbuka but what the piece I'm working on cries for is the rough-edged, meaty sound of bare hand on stretched hide.)



I also had the shortest crisis of confidence ever. I've been writing all day, finished the chapter and the draft now stands at 10,000 words. And I've reached that point of exhaustion where it all starts to blur and I can't even make sense of my own writing much less the actual data I'm trying to work with.

I hit a YouTube video about a conflict I'd never heard of (Celtic invasion of Greece in about 200 BC) and in the comments section, people are beating up the video and quoting Pausanius at each other and having ridiculously detailed arguments with single posts longer than any of what I'd thought were overly long historical discussions in mine. Face it, the stuff about who bridged what river is trivial.

But I forced myself into chapter planning for the "Just enjoying being a tourist" breather chapter, and hit another video over dinner to get some ideas, and here is a guy who is doing very nice camera work and seems quite personable but is on the Acropolis and keeps calling the big building they have there the "Pantheon." (Plus a bunch of other just-read-the-signs mistakes).

So am I confident? No. Am I in fact feeling overwhelmed by all that still faces me in the novel? You bet. But I'm still going.

(I've got a hell of a Spartacus going on with my dialog right now. In the big pissing contest, Athena Fox, Signor Cosimo Nardella, and Vash go into lecture mode with identical sentence structure and word choice. I don't even know, now, how I'm going to get everyone's voices distinct.)

Life is a giant game of wiki-surf

I hate weekends.

Well, I really need them to try to rest and unwind from work week. But I spend every week accumulating a giant list of things I won't have time to work on until the weekend. Setting up way too much expectation and ending up Sunday night feeling like I wasted an opportunity.

##

That's the thing, you know. Every time you learn something, or create something, you also create a sort of promise or obligation. You wrote a fanfic? Congrats -- now you have fans who are waiting for you to write something more. You learned how to run a lathe? Well, guess what? Now you need to find things to lathe to justify having spent that effort. And then stay at it because skills get rusty if not used. You built something? Good, now build a better one with all that you've learned.

And, sure, especially in the Digital Age we all of us have invested countless hours in learning how to work pieces of technology (especially software programs!) we will never, ever, need to use again. But as you age you also accumulate skills that you simply don't have the time, energy, interest in keeping up. I can't tell you how many people I've met who spent two years, three years, six years studying violin but haven't picked one up in longer than they can remember.

Everything is also connected in huge branching, multiply cross-linked trees. You get interested in ukulele and that gets you interested in guitar, in music theory, in Hawaiian culture, in Tiki kitsch.  Which gets you into rock music, fast-Fourier transforms, colonialism, Buck Rogers. And every one of those new interests is clamoring at you to give it some time. Especially after you've given in and taken a look and its good money after bad, all the way down.

##

So I've got a half-dozen projects I'm contemplating at the moment. Most of them want me to buy something, though, and since I just made a big credit card payment (still paying off the Greece vacation) I'm loathe.

Making a drum: I can scrounge some but even building an improvised steam box means buying a chunk of PVC. I can bend without but I'd get better results with a spring steel bending strap ("only" twenty four bucks at Stew-Mac). I can force myself to using recycled scrap wood for the bending form but the head? Yes; I experimented with mylar, cotton-poly, oiled muslin, sized muslin (the latter wasn't bad, especially when I took a tip from tabla players I'd met and, lacking wax, put some wood putty on to add weight). But the decent sound comes from hide and that's yet another purchase. Even if there are goat skins sold locally.

Making a ukulele is going to be more, even if I avoid the temptation of Stew-Mac's catalog. But that's not currently on a front burner. I still have a box in the closet that's filled with parts and plans for a solid-body uke or two, and that box was stashed before I discovered Road Toad strings and the kinds of new instruments those opened up.

I've been thinking about video technology as well. I'm going to try throwing together a miniature LED-based soft-box. I can do the first one with what I have lying around, even though by the time you add labor I might as well have dropped the thirty bucks a pair of plastic ones cost on Anklezone. The more intriguing idea, though, is the combination of a retroreflective surface with an LED camera ring for low-hassle chroma-key. Glass beads don't come cheap, though...and somehow all my lengths of scrap green LED strip-light are already gone.

##

Writing, though. No work and a nice sunny day and it is terribly hard to keep from dozing off and feeling pressured to get "something" done just doesn't help. I've reached a tentative approach to the thematic issues I mentioned a post or two ago, and am currently trying to puzzle out just what the opening "tomb" looks like so I can re-write that scene.

This is far, far from me believing there was even a slim chance I'd have a rough draft done before the last show opened. That show is now closed and I'm having to rewrite what draft I have from the very first word.

Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people who don't sweat the details like this, whether they are people who self-publish through Amazingbone or a surprising number of best-sellers. And I have to admit I'd probably worry about Getting it Right even if I was trying to do a generic fantasy novel. My excuse for the current is this is pushing all my buttons; I care about supporting good science, and I care about reproducibility. Much of this story is framed as travel advice and I'd really rather that was good advice. And the rest is joining a current debate on ownership of history about which many people feel...strongly.

So, yeah.

Build it and they will drum

I picked up a cheap Typhoon darbuka* and have started learning the strokes (my doum and tak are...okay...but the dak or left-hand tak is going to take a bit to develop. Unfortunate, because it's the rolls I need for the song I'll be working on soon). The sound is a little too...bright? Metallic? Anyhow, it doesn't seem right for the Gue piece I'm trying to record now.

I want yet another drum. Something like a 12" side drum that's 4" deep and has a goatskin head. I could build one... but it turns out the techniques of bending wood appropriate for guitar and ukulele are different from those best for bending drum shells. So much for building a drum as a learning project on the way to building a uke.

Thing is, do I want to build a uke? That's the real question.

It's a strange place to be. Way back when, I started making music on keyboard and rack-mount synthesizers. You'd compose something for, say, violin and guitar and piano, but you'd play it all on a keyboard, capture your performance as MIDI data, and plug that data into a machine that made sounds like violin and guitar and piano.

I talked to musicians and read about orchestration and the thought started even way back then that you'd get better results with that keyboard and those rack modules if you had experience with the "real" instrument.

Meanwhile I was in theatre, and learning how to make things that looked like they were made of polished wood and solid brass but were really plywood and styrofoam and paint. And instead of making things that worked, we made things that looked like they could work and then faked it with fishline, hidden lights, sound effects, re-purposed toys.

My paychecks improved enough over the years to where I could actually afford a decent computer, and make the move to Software Synthesis; the same electronically-created guitar sounds, but without so many trailing wires.

I still dreamed of getting my hands on a real trumpet or even a real violin, but that was a dream that seemed financially out of reach.

Meanwhile the Maker movement was changing the options. I welded for theatre but TechShop offered the chance to work metal in an entirely new way.

I did pick up a ukulele along the way. The face of mass production was changing in the electronic age, and there were starting to appear $40 instruments that actually played.

Yeah, I'd owned a recorder for years. A couple of them (recorders are cheap, as long as you stick to the higher-pitched members of the family). But the uke was an eye-opener. Your first experience with a guitar is going to be buzzing frets and painful grooves in your fingers. A uke has such a light action it doesn't do that. You can start chording the first day. And gain the confidence to face that full-sized steel-string later.

The Maker movement was growing, with processes formerly used only in big companies moving to the small shop and the individual maker. And thanks to the VA, I got a membership to the local TechShop and was able to try some of that myself.

This changed utterly how I looked at prop construction. Sure, I could and still did fake it with styrofoam and paint when appropriate, but I could now actually build out of "real" materials. Metals and hardwoods and so forth were no longer out of reach.


And then I got a day job. The title is a lot less prestigious than "Resident Sound Designer" but boy does it pay more.

That revolution in production was still going on. I took a chance and blew a couple hundred on an electric violin. And that opened the gate. As the paychecks kept coming in, I realized I was able to afford, first, a Chinese-made trumpet, then, an actual German-made student-quality acoustic violin.

And I was learning enough in the process that I could take the risk of cheap instruments and trust I could fix them or work around them anyhow.

I went back to the composing bench with the idea of doing the synthesis-based stuff I'd always been doing but folding in a part or two from a real instrument to improve the articulation and realism.

But then it occurred to me I'd collected enough instruments by this point to actually be able to play all the parts. And that was a really attractive idea.

The prop-building was still going on and the revolution in electronics led me to lean more and more on computing power; "fix it in the mix" works for props as well as it does in the recording studio (or, rather, on the DAW.)

Thing is, I already came out of sound design where altering real sounds to new purposes was a central part of the game. I'd long been exposed to the variety of a similarly utilitarian approach to music, from the washtub bases of various folk music traditions to the experiments with vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens of composers like John Cage to the hectic and oft-compromised business of live sound where often you had to improvise some combination of mic placement and board EQ to get the sound that was musically appropriate for that night's show.

So it really shouldn't have taken the arrival of a jointer-planer at the shop I work at to make me think of making musical instruments -- leveraging the available processes and skills in working real materials other than styrofoam and paint -- that could be used in a musical way -- leveraging here the skills both in playing technique (on "better" instruments) and in musical understanding of how to make use of those sounds and, of course, the electronic tools that could warp and shape the result to fit into a final composition.

There's an element of experimental archaeology in this (going along with my renewed interest in history) as well as ethnomusicology. And that's a dangerously attractive road; not only does every instrument have a playing tradition and an idiom that the composer can learn either to mimic or to learn from, instruments also have a building tradition that the luthier could chose to learn.

My own Shetland Gue is a visual mimic of Charlie Bynum's museum replica, down to the stick bow and the twisted-fibre tailpiece. But I was entirely happy to use power tools to build it.

And that's where I am now. I am conflicted musically, as I want to go in so many directions and finding the hours to practice becomes increasingly problematic (heck, finding storage space is becoming problematic!) I wish I could do as a composer friend of mine did and pick a dozen sounds (yes, on the rack mount synths, but the principle still holds) and just work within their sonic possibilities.

And, yes, the "bardic cover" idea is still amusing. Doing not just acoustic covers of existing music, but doing them with archaic instruments whenever possible, seems like both long-term fun and a decent "brand."

But I like all music, and all instruments excite me. I'm not the type to just do guitar, do everything on that guitar, and, yes, admittedly get very good on that guitar. I'm not cut out to be an ace, but rather a jack.

And same goes for instrument building. As attractive is the idea of getting deeper into tonewoods and sinew and hand-axes and natural materials -- and the concurrent idea of recreating ancient instruments -- is the idea of finding ways to laser-cut and machine and electronify and create things that are unique. And, yeah, to find how the available technologies, both the newest CNC mills and the old theatrical standbys, could be used to make things that look one way and play entirely different.

Like...a playable Goddess Harp.

* Darbuka, doumbek, dumbek, tarbuka, tabla....the closest thing you'll get to an agreement on what to call the "Middle-Eastern Goblet Drum" is that the "Turkish" style with the exposed tuners should probably be called a darbuka.

Hoo New

Couldn't leave it alone. If you look carefully at the pic above, I not only swapped out the brass tuning pins for proper zither pins, but took the excuse to re-drill for seven strings instead of six.

Which involved shaving very tiny dowels out of the red oak and gluing them into the old holes, but anyhow. Also re-carved the bridge and made a new tailpiece. Even tied on proper tailpiece knots (although would work better if the holes were spaced further back).

(I also have to say I like the sound of the metal-wound nylon string better than the bare nylon ones.)

What changes? A few more melodies open up. Especially if I use "pinch harmonics" to get that octave. And I can play triads for all the notes of the major scale (with necessary inversions; the VII chord has the root on the top). On the downside, I practically have to play the seventh degree on the I chord because otherwise there's two dead "plunks" at the top of the strum.

This is the spot where you really start to learn about the functionality of the instrument. I've been working with it, finding different ways to play it, seeing how to record it. I have to say I find the string noise a bit objectionable, especially in the strum. That's something that in many musical cultures is considered a feature not a bug. Musicologists write of the "percussive effect of the strum" when reconstructing performance practice for a Sutton Hoo-type lyre.

So, yeah. Next instrument, proper tonewoods. A larger sound cavity, a thinner back. Larger wouldn't hurt and make sure the midpoint of the strings is fully exposed for easier harmonics. Also flatten the curve of the pins. Calculate the tone hole (and put a rosette in it).

Okay: tuning up a whole step helped, as did going to a leather pick (in the example below, leather pick, nail strum in the traditional way, finger strum, and finger picking.)

Still, I'm unlikely to do a second Sutton Hoo. Might do a Trossingham, or a Celtic Lyre. Or a harp. Or one of two fictional instruments. Such as:

Traditional Vulcan Lyre: Assume that the contemporary (contemporary with Spock) instrument is an electric with a highly modified sound. Go back into the instrument's history to project what it might have been as a strictly acoustic instrument. Were the strings gathered at a single-point bridge and was there a tremolo knob (as is apparently the case with the Kithara?) Were there drone strings?

Goddess Harp: I am still puzzled by how to make this acoustic, whilst staying as close as possible to in-game depiction. For instance, since the strings appear to attached directly to the crossbar, the tuners might want to be hidden inside the body. So what is the soundboard? Is it the upper curve? (It feels like this is curved too much to be acoustically viable. Sure, a violin has a curved soundboard, but the Goddess Harp represents a smaller, more highly shaped area, with a much sharper curve.) Or is the soundboard hidden inside, along the frontal plane?

I'm tempted to design some test rigs. But later. Much later. At the moment I have an instrument and I have the music I meant to make with it loaded into Reaper.

Sutton Hoo

Sometime in the 7th century an Anglian King was buried in his ship on the banks of a river in Suffolk, England. Most people will remember the Sutton Hoo helmet (which is on display at the British Museum.)

There were also sufficient fragments to reconstruct a lyre. Unlike the Greek Kithara with the separate crossbar this is a compact rectangular instrument that gives the appearance of being made from a single plank.

The historical playing style, as reconstructed by Master Dofinn-Hallr Morrisson, is that it is strummed with the right hand (plectrum or backstroke with the nails) whilst the support hand mutes selected strings autoharp style. It can also be plucked from the right hand, and a modern master has demonstrated drone plucking with the left thumb as well as pinch harmonics.

Acoustically, it is a cigar-box guitar without a fretboard. Which I expect would make it relatively robust to changes in dimension and shape. Most people who have made a Sutton Hoo-style lyre have modified them in various ways for ease of play and ease of construction. I borrowed several elements from other lyre builders for this my first build, relying largely on instructions made freely available by David Friedman/Cariadoc.

And, yes, I dream about grain-matched sapele and torrefied sitka spruce but I decided to make this a budget build; fast and cheap.



MATERIALS:

White Pine: a short plank of 1 x 12. The most common (and cheapest) lumber at any store.
Basswood (linden): an eighth-inch thick hobby board (8" x 24") from Orchard Supply Store.
Red Cedar: another OSH hobby board, quarter inch thick and 2" wide.
Brass rod: one eight inch, also from OSH's hobby supplies.
A pack of cheap acoustic guitar strings from Starving Musician.

Total materials about fifteen bucks. (Staining and finishing adds a bit, but the instrument plays fine without all that).


BODY:

First step was drawing out. I scaled Cariadoc's outer dimensions (8" x 30") to the wood I had, then after drawing it checked to make sure I could still get a hand inside. In case you are wondering, I went for 6" x 17", with 3/4" side rails (cut back to 1/2" inside the soundbox). That gives it roughly the scale length of a ukulele.

There's two basic ways to make the soundbox on this; either cut out a hole and cover front and back with solid pieces of wood (quarter inch for the back...and I'll discuss the soundboard soon enough). Or you can carve out the cavity. I chose to do it the quick and dirty way. The two long boards in the picture here are guides to keep the router from flying through the side walls should I slip.

(Later in the rout I added a top board and adjusted the plunge; otherwise the unsupported router can tip into the gap you are carving and ruin the piece.)

Three passes with the router, and a tiny bit of clean-up with a wood rasp, and the soundbox is made.

Next was cutting out the hand hole. Typical jigsaw work. (I'm spoiled; I also have bandsaw and scrollsaw available.)

After all the holes were done I used table saw and chopsaw to take the original plank down to dimension, bandsaw to rough out the ends, then bench sander to round things off properly. The interior cut, alas, had to be approached with hand rasp.

White pine is strong enough in these dimensions, especially for "gut" (nylon) stringing. The go-to wood is ash, although spruce, maple, cedar, yew and others are all nice alternatives. Plywood will work as well; again, this structure is under small enough stresses that regular plywood will handle it. It won't sound as good, of course, but it can sound good enough.


SOUNDBOARD:

Rough-cut the soundboard to slightly over the dimensions of the body, and pre-cut a sound hole. The Sutton Hoo lyres did not use a sound hole but several modern versions do.

I made mine an arbitrary size and position -- I went for roughly a third, as the third has magical properties in musical instruments (directly center you risk amplifying the primary resonance node of the body. And, yes, you can calculate the resonance frequency of the cavity. There's a simple formulae many luthiers use for sound hole size but it is based on an ideal Helmholtz resonator. Later papers show the critical factor is actually the length of the edge, not the area of the hole (which is why rosettes work, and why a violin has f-holes).

Basically, soundboard is like the head of a drum, and is where much of the volume is coming from. Cutting a hole allows the air inside the sound cavity to communicate with the outside, raising the volume but also changing the timbre (favoring the lower frequencies).

This is why you want a nice wood for the soundboard. Basswood is technically a hardwood and has been used for tonewood, but the best vote for it is that it is better than plywood.

There's an extra bit here. Pine and basswood are softer woods and might not support a tuning pin. As with other builders, I reinforced the crossbar with another wood (the red cedar). Routed down the thickness of the plank, stuck it in, glued down everything. I could have used more clamps.


TAILPIECE:

There are a number of different ways you can fasten the dead end of the strings. I followed another Sutton Hoo builder in carving a simple tailpiece out of red cedar. For simplicity in build I drove a dowel (actually, a piece cut off the end of a cheap foam brush) into the heel (where I'd intentionally made the wall a little thicker just for this. The tailpiece is fastened to this heel peg with a loop of steel wire.

The original tailpiece had this decorative hole. For strength I replaced it with a solid tailpiece. I've seen a bunch of different ways of tying on the strings but I haven't found one I like yet. Also, the test fit used leather laces. Those snapped. I tried a braided cord and that creeped. So now it is steel wire.

TUNING PINS:

The go-to for amateur luthiers is the zither pin; cheap, easy to install, holds well and doesn't take up a lot of space. It is what harps use, even the harp inside a piano. I was in a hurry and wanted to see if this could be done on a budget so I went for hand-fabricated brass.

Simple; cut out lengths of rod, pounded one end flat on the anvil, drilled a hole, the chucked it in a drill and "lathed" a rough point on the other end. Drilled a size too small and pounded them in with a block of wood.

BRIDGE

The bridge is also carved from that same budget-stretching chunk of red cedar.

Actually, three bridges. Basically, all sound comes from the vibrating string. But a string has a small cross-section. It moves very little air. To get a performance-level sound you need an impedance matcher. It's the same thing that causes a trumpet to have a bell. The soundboard provides the large area to shove air. The bridge acoustically couples the string to the soundboard.

And it is a dance. The violin bridge is thin and flexible because it is designed to steal the maximum energy from the string. A violin string is continuously energized and has very little sustain. Volume is a trade-off for sustain.

So my first bridge was too low. The second used a nut-and-saddle arrangement like a guitar bridge; the hard contact point steals less energy from the string meaning longer sustain but less volume. But that didn't sound good. So the final bridge was raw red cedar, and I'm shaving it down to be thinner and more responsive today.

Position is also critical. Unlike a guitar, I chose a captive bridge arrangement; it is held in place only by the tension of the strings.


STRINGING:

Yes, this is out of order. You don't need to stain and varnish your instrument in order to try playing it. Period instruments weren't. Well, not really (a little linseed oil at least).

For this build I put a knot in the end of each string and passed them through a hole in the tailpiece. Next build I'll try a bridge knot. Then wrapped around the tuning pin and through the hole. Get them all on and then stand up the bridge under them.

A nice benefit to the short scale length is I could get two courses from each guitar string. So this is strung with the top three strings of a nylon acoustic set; the G, the B, and the E (Gather Before Elrond).

The lyre is tuned diatonically, often omitting the second scale degree (aka for C Major you'd tune C, D, E, F, G, A) Also often inverted, starting on the third or fourth degree. I tuned mine to A Major, included the second, and since like all my examples it only has six strings that means I have no seventh.

Seven strings is better. Seven strings means you can play many melodies (just transpose down the octave) and you can "fret" all the triads of the major scale (with the appropriate inversions).


FINISHING:

This is more a "lessons learned" for me. It is really hard to tell when you've got the scratches out on softwoods. I sanded like heck, stained, and only then discovered a bunch more scratches. Sanded out the scratches, tried a different stain, and it made a lovely ancient-wood look but in the end I went for a darker serious instrument look. 

And really, I hurried too much. And no -- polyurethane is fast but it deadens the sound a little. Shellac next time.

Next time. Hardwoods, perhaps tuning pegs. Seven strings or better (historical depictions show a break around seven strings; either they have fewer and are played strum-and-block, or they have more and are played plucked like a harp, front-and-back-hand style). 

Rosette because why not (when I have a laser, after all). 

But, really, I've learned what I need from a Sutton Hoo. It is time to build a different lyre, or perhaps a proper harp...

Wandring minstrel I

The Mini-Hoo is done.

My only real disappointment is that I made it with six strings (most of the makers I was following had used six strings on theirs.) Seven strings would allow me to do a bunch more melodies and all of the major triads (in the appropriate inversions) of a major scale.

This was all about the learning. I built it cheap, mostly because I didn't want to waste time and money on something that might not work at all, but also to see if it could be done. And, yes; for about $15 in supplies and a couple afternoons work I got an instrument that doesn't sound too bad.

I've never built an instrument from scratch. There's a thing about experience that goes beyond the itemized and the strictly quantifiable; a gut sense of fabrication times and achievable tolerances and material variance and structural strength and stress patterns and failure modes. I had it in wood and basic woodworking. Now I have some of that in instrument building.

The first tailpiece hitch was leather cord. That snapped. The second was nylon string. That stretched. Now it is wire and I can tune it up to pitch. So that's a nice idea of the stresses and the material qualities required to withstand them. The hand-made brass tuning pins are right on the edge; when I tune to AMaj they are starting to creep. I'll be dropping in zither pins when I remove the revised bridge for finishing.

So that's a few learning experiences already. I went through three bridges; the first turned out to be too short when I changed how the strings were set into the tailpiece. The second had a brass rod for a nut to get the maximum sustain out of the strings. But then I decided I wanted volume instead, so I pulled the brass and reshaped the red oak of the bridge and it now has a decent sound. And if I shaved it thinner, it will be even less sustain but also change the tonal qualities (I hope, in a positive direction).

That, and moving the bridge around a lot, plus strumming in different places, to try and get an idea of what is going on in the interaction of all those elements.

Oh, and as one instrument builder put it, even a plywood soundboard will sound nicer when you tune the instrument higher...up until the moment it implodes. I can get lower tones easy enough, but it didn't get a nice sound until it was pitched up around ukulele pitches. Which sorta makes sense as the scale length is about ukulele size, too.

So, yeah, white pine is strong enough for this, and basswood (linden) makes a decent soundboard, but now I have a more focused instinct for what is asked of the materials and now I wouldn't dare use anything but a hardwood (or at least baltic birch ply) for a Celtic Harp. And I think I know how a decent tonewood would improve on the sound of an instrument like this one.

Even the varnish matters. I used polyurethane and yes I can hear the difference. Fortunately, for this instrument and my tastes, the changes aren't all bad.

I did this instrument entirely without math, and there are ways to figure out optimum string lengths and bridge placement and tone hole size but, you know, a good structure and a proper sound cavity and you can get a decent sound off a rather surprising variety of proportions.

Next post (probably!) the actual build, and sound samples.

Talk to the thumb

Wood stain is drying on my Sutton Hoo. I will not be surprised if the tuning pegs don't hold or the tailpiece snaps when I put it under tension, but no biggie. I have proper zither pins arriving Monday. The only reason I went with the brass pins is I wanted to see if it made a sound before I wasted a lot of time doing the finish work.

So I guess it makes sense I've started a Reaper file for "Uncharted Worlds" (the music that plays in the galaxy map and planet probe screen of all the Mass Effect games). The process is a little different on this one; found a MIDI file that seems close enough. Spent the afternoon finding voicing for it that matched the capabilities of my available instruments. And tried the top one (the ukulele part). Not too bad.

(Toughest part is my violin-trained instinct is to fret each upcoming note as soon as possible. For a guitar or uke part you may want to stay fretted in order to let the note sustain.)

Yes, there's a link. I started thinking about baby harps and similar when I realized "Uncharted Worlds" would need more and distinct voices than I currently own. And that got me thinking about instrument kits and one thing led to another...and there will be a fully detailed post on my new instrument when it is done and functional and I've had a chance to record a sample off it.



Bass practice is ongoing for the Hellboy cover. My thumb finally listened to me (I think it was changing my position; took off the neck strap and propped the bass on a leg instead. That freed my plucking hand from a support role.) So anyhow the thumb slide method is working for me now. Still some issues damping the D string but it is much less problematic than that A.

Yeah; on listen through playback other than headphones the test bass part I recorded really wasn't working for me. I need that finger plucked sound and I need to control the excess resonance. And that means learning proper bass technique.



And speaking of a Link:

While I was looking at various people's DIY harps and lyres I ran across builds of the "Goddess Harp" from Zelda: Skyward Sword. It is a nice-looking piece but I'm not sure how to make a functional harp from it.

Here's the sitch. The definition of "harp" is strings running perpendicular to the soundboard: in fact, they terminate in the soundboard. The lyre family -- as well as lutes and zithers -- have strings that run parallel to the soundboard and they acoustically couple to it via the bridge. (Think of a lyre as a guitar without a fretboard, and a zither as a guitar without a fretboard or a neck).

All of these work -- aka, project with volume and a good tone -- because there is a resonant cavity under the soundboard. For a guitar, that's the body of the instrument; try playing an electric guitar unplugged and you'll see exactly what that body does.

So the shape of the upper part of the Zelda harp is like a Kithara, the early Greek lyre. The strings terminate on a crosspiece which is suspended between two horns. However, in a Kithara the horns project from a soundbox -- the lower body -- with a bridge and tailpiece.. The Zelda harp is basically a croissant shape and the strings terminate along the inner curve as if it were a harp.

This would have lousy acoustics. Best I can think of is hide a soundboard inside, and then provide an opening for the sound to get out. There's also the issue of the crosspiece but builders have flattened that and added traditional tuning pegs to it without seriously harming the aesthetics of the instrument.

One alternative would be to make it an electric harp. Trouble is, you have to stick a pickup on every single string, unless they terminate in a single resonating piece (like, say...a soundboard).

Or go completely out of physical acoustics and make a laser harp. You could even stick a laser smoke generator in the body and even 5mW lasers would become visible. I think green lasers would look nice with the gold finish. Of course once you've started adding lights...why not make the harp body glow (gold, of course) as well?

But that gets into a completely different kind of project. One I could do. It is rather annoying, really; I've spent several decades collecting an eclectic set of skills from sculpture to fabrication to electronics and I would be entirely comfortable in approaching such a project. But I'm really more interested in learning the basics of acoustic instruments right now.

(Which also leaves out the Vulcan Lyre; although you could build an archtop, both the body shape and the canonical sound produced argues for it to be heavily electronic. Also, it is even more popular than the Zelda harp and there are at least two really excellent ones made by professional luthiers already.)

Say, I wonder if there are other fictional instruments of the string family? (Yes, there's the Skyrim lute, but I've watched a build of it and it is basically a shallow guitar with a lot of extra gingerbread.) I might be tempted to do that one but only as an electric and with full CNC.

Which is also a direction I'm going of late. Sure, it is fun to putter around a woodshop hand-shaping little bits of hardwood, but these days I'd just as soon leverage every labor-saving, time-saving, technological enhancement available. That's the thing I'm proudest about my Mini-Hoo, at least so far; that it took two afternoons to build (and one of them was mostly the sanding).

Scoring yourself

The more I practice violin, the more I can hear mistakes -- in myself, and in others.

To properly evaluate a skill you need to have some of that skill. Of course, there are external metrics possible; you don't have to know how to play a violin in order to be able to detect if one sounds bad. The thing you don't know is how much skill is involved.

Everyone commits a Dunning-Kruger somewhere. Here's my rule of thumb for avoiding that syndrome; assume a bell curve. If it seems really, really easy or simple to you, but other people are spending a lot of time and effort and otherwise complaining about how hard it is...it is probably you, not them.

As a corollary or maybe ancillary, humans are competitive and ingenious. They will always find a way to do it better, or otherwise raise the difficulty. So whatever activity you are thinking of, look at it in terms of how much time, effort, money it seems sensible for people to be investing it. That's the peak of the bell curve.

So, yes, there are tools by which you can evaluate yourself. It is easy to say you are your own worst critic. In one sense this may be true; you are critical of those things you notice. The wider audience may find other flaws more worthy of attention. Thing is, to say that someone is better than they think they are is the same as saying they don't know what "good" sounds like. And if they don't know that...they aren't very good. Either way, this well-meaning comment is, basically, insulting.




The flip side to the bell curve above is that if you know almost nothing about it but believe it is too hard for you...you are probably wrong. If violin was as hard as some people think then they wouldn't sell a lot of violins. (Well, they might sell them, at that...but there wouldn't be a lot of symphony orchestras, because those things need half a hundred players each).

A thing I hear a lot from people is, "I wouldn't know where to start."

Oops. Now you do. "Where do I start?" is a very, very good starting point. The first step is not to be thrown in the deep end with a violin and a concert score. It is by talking to people who play, watching videos, browsing stores, talking to teachers....basically, answering that question of, "Where do I start?"

Every project I have done has required planning. And more often than not the planning started with planning the planning; with trying to frame just what the project is, what skills or resources will be involved, what the overall goals are. I may be "creative" (whatever the hell that means) but I don't just sit down with a keyboard or paintbrush or CNC Router. I start with scraps of paper and conversations with friends...

...and long, rambling blog posts.

Watch this (Maker) Space

TechShop may be having a Mark Twain moment.

However, far from there being a "rumor" of its demise, it was the CEO who sent a mass emailing and open letter to the Maker community in which he stated Chapter 7 had been filed, the company was dissolved, and the assets were now in the hands of the court.

As of a week ago there's a new email drifting around (which much smaller circulation*) in which that same CEO says they've sold the company and it will arise anew as TechShop 2.0. And oh yeah; they didn't actually file the Chapter 7.

TechShop RIP

I can't say I didn't see it coming. When I gave them a thousand bucks for the current year's membership I did so reluctantly aware they might not last the year.

What I didn't expect -- what no-one expected -- is that one Wednesday morning their loyal members would find the doors locked, no-one answering the phone...nothing but a (belated) email later that afternoon explaining that they had filed Chapter 7 and no longer existed as a company.

Yes, I understand why the members were kept in the dark. They were still hoping to find an investor or strike a bargain. But on sober reflection I don't sympathize. The above translates as, "We were in such dire financial shape we had to hide our books from the suckers we were trying to entice to give us more money, so of course we had to lie to our own members lest they give the truth away."

So, yeah. I feel betrayed.

It was a useless effort anyway. When I realized TechShop was in trouble I went web surfing and everywhere I found future investors hanging out, they all knew damn well (and in better depth and detail than I did) how bad off TechShop was.




It might have been smarter to be open and lay out exactly what they were dealing with. The kind of help they needed went beyond finding some random guy in Dubai to send them an infusion of cash. They needed a restructuring, they needed a better business model.

But I have to wonder if this wasn't almost implicit in shape of the very thing we were trying to preserve. TechShop was Maker. It ran on the philosophy of throwing it together. A sort of laissez-faire approach to building where doing it the right way or even the safe way was de-emphasized in favor of experiment and originality and the freedom to fail.

I loved the hands-off approach. TechShop gave you just enough instruction to get started and at least know the obvious ways to cut your own hands off, then let you alone to study, learn, and make your own mistakes. The alternatives I've looked at are much more about the "community," with a touchy-feely atmosphere so strong it makes you look around for the Kool-aid. If you wanted to come in at ten at night, speak to no-one, log into the machine and make a few cuts TechShop was the place to be.

The thing that I will miss most is the multitude of options. Sure, I can get access to many of the operations and some of the machines. I can send away to Ponoko to laser. I can get printing done at Shapeways. I can build my own mini vacuum-former and I can do some machining at the machines at work. But this isn't the same as having all those tools right there to hand.

When TechShop was open I could laser off a little bit bit of material or even a stencil or whatever. Now it is either wait two weeks for Ponoko or use hand-cut with X-acto knives and what-not or simply find some other (probably less efficient) way of achieving the desired effect. I was just that day contemplating using the Brother CNC embroidery machine for a possible project -- that's how I found out within a few hours of the closure.

It is a more flexible, nimble, exploratory way of working. Having daily access also better supports iteration; you can try out ideas knowing that you can run off an improved part the next day. Having to mail off a file and wait two weeks for delivery (plus paying the money for the service) seriously constrains that.

The part I regret most is all of the leveling up. I found all the collectables, I finished the side quests, and I unlocked so much. Which is to say, I took (and paid a lot of money for) a great many Safety and Basic Use classes. CNC mill, CNC router, 3d printer, laser scanner, laser engraver, metal lathe, wood lathe...  That is all waste. The classes are far too introductory to be considered worthwhile general instruction in that tool, and they are too site-specific to save me anything at somewhere like, say, Crucible -- meaning more time and more money to get back to having full access to the same tools.




What could they have done differently? Well, for one thing they were badly organized and badly managed. And their crisis response was to do more of the same. When they saw budget shortfalls they spent less on maintenance and salaries and started shorting their own instructors. Which is to say; they removed value from the thing they were trying to sell in the first place. They also ran endless promotions, which besides bringing in short-term cash at the cost of long-term income (membership specials that over the long run brought in less than the cost of maintaining that membership) raised a pervasive odor of desperation.

I would have gladly paid more. I'm not sure how many other members would agree, but perhaps if they had been open about their books we might have. I'm also not sure it would have been enough.

Let me attempt a back-of-the-envelop here. Assume capital investment in the actual machines on the order of 20K per "machine," a half-dozen machines in four generalized groupings -- call it 20 and apply another 20 worth of smaller tools and supplies. So that's 800K to be amortized over ten years of service life before you need to spend an equivalent amount in replacement or repair. Double that annual cost to 160K to cover staffing, utilities, etc. (And that's probably an understatement; even with the expense of these tools I could easily see their amortization working out to only a quarter of the total annual costs).

I'd say there were fifty people there most times I've visited, with capacity say a hundred. That allows a standing membership of 400-800. Being generous, the latter 800 members would have to pay...$2,000 annually. Which isn't that far off (their Makers Fair specials ran that number down to just below $1k, but to compensate monthly members pay about %140).

I suspect strongly my numbers are far too low both on ongoing maintenance costs for the equipment and staffing costs. So...would I have spent 4K for a membership? Perhaps.

I'm going to also assume that classes are a wash; they money they bring in should go into decent pay for the instructors, because you want quality instructors but the class prices are about as high as anyone wants to go. Also, quality instructors means you could expand past the SBU's and start offering proper in-depth instruction for those that wanted it.




But here's where the model that works for me stumbles into the question of the actual market. And I have some deeply pessimistic ideas about that. I've noticed at other corners of the generalized Maker sphere that the emphasis is on "getting your feet wet." Everyone is offering introductory classes, introductory kits, first-time user specials.

Which is great, and also links into STEAM and the focus on getting more young people started into actually building things again. Leaving aside the gripe that so many of these kits and classes seem more about the illusion of building things -- the Arduino equivalent of a Paint-By-Numbers kit -- I keep getting the sensation that the biggest problem the Make movement faces is retention.

By which I mean I suspect a great many more people are "getting their feet wet" than who actually end up swimming. So that model of yearly members bringing in a steady cash flow may be wrong. It may be that many of the people at TechShop come in for a month, a week, even a single class. Or send their kid there on a STEAM outreach program. And maybe print something or do a couple name tags on the laser printer but don't stay.

And, sure, the typical cycle for the serious user/entrepreneur is to go three to five years during development and growth: until they can afford their own machines and don't need to continue paying membership. I suspect particularly the generalist (like me) is very much the minority. I made "props." Most people coming in on a regular basis are making "product" and they rapidly narrow down to just one or two machines that they do most of the work on (and can as their business grows afford to own themselves).

There's also the impression among some that there are members thriving on the atmosphere. Like investment bankers soaking in the artsiness of live-work loft spaces, they come to park on a table with their laptops and the free wifi and coffee like a more tech-centric Starbucks. Like the Paint-By-Numbers above, I keep getting this impression of people doing the sizzle and not the steak. Of putting on the beret but never actually touching paint.

Because, honestly, if you are young and hungry what you want is investors. Looking like the next Steve Jobs is a lot more important than actually soldering anything. So TechShop functions in this way as a combination meeting ground, bullpen, source of inspiration and photogenic backdrop.




And myself? I don't know.  This is a music week -- I did complete my bass case and post up a new Instructable (which already got Editor's Pick) but basically I'm playing, not building. The only reason I even looked in on TechShop yesterday was about an idea I had for a Bodhran case.

Am I phasing back out of prop work? Am I going to go in different directions? I don't know. About the only thing I'm sure of is none of the other maker spaces in the Bay Area look that attractive. They almost all seem small and ingrown and very clubby, with a sort of shipping pallet and cinderblock earnestness that only really works for the young and hip and at least slightly delusional.

The only offering that exudes any kind of professionalism is the Crucible, and they take it to the other extreme; serious fees, serious classes, and the pervasive impression I get from them is you don't dare think about doing your own machining until you've done five years of apprenticeship under the eagle gaze of the senior members. Plus they are mostly about fire and glass and metal and although I've flirted with the idea of casting it isn't enough to draw me there.

Really, I miss my lasers. (And the vacuum-form machine, and a lathe I didn't have to fight over).

Frantic Activity

I forget who said about the swan: that it looks so serene gliding across the water, but under the surface there's all this frantic activity. That seems to apply to a lot of things, musical instruments included. In the case of brass and many of the woodwinds, what the serenity of the resulting melodic line hides is the intense physical effort involved. It takes a ridiculous amount of pressure to even get through the first octave.

It is a different sort of difficulty than that of violin. For violin, the movements are so necessarily precise you have to concentrate intensely no matter how simple the melodic line appears. For brass, there are most certainly nuances, but for the beginning brass player it is all about the physical stamina.

(Well, it is a learning thing. The better my embouchure gets -- and the stronger my lip muscles get -- the less force I have to put behind my breath. And the better the tone as well. That's what's causing the octaves to slowly open up. I'm getting the fifth partial already, and it's been a little over a week).

Of course the piece I'm working on now is all recorder and crumhorn....and bodhran.




The bass case is complete. I'd give it a B+ for concept, maybe even A-, but a D- for execution. It looks ugly, but it works well enough to tote the bass back and forth. But I still haven't gotten around to repairing/replacing the built-in pre-amp so I haven't been getting much practice on it.

So I don't know if I want to do an Instructable on a hybrid case off that example. I may have to wait and make another case. But the next one I might try vacuum-form and expanding foam as techniques...

Future (theater) shock

The Control Booth forum has started emailing notifications again so I logged in to see what they were talking about.

At least two of the projects I'd been tinkering with over the years have been done by others. And done well.

The simpler is the QU-Box, which leverages a Teensy (Arduino compatible with native USB capability) and some arcade buttons to make a dedicated controller box for QLab. Honestly, though, I was an evening of soldering away from doing it for decades -- but my Korg nanokey worked so well for me I never saw the point in completing the project.

Still, kudos to Simon for making a solid, functional device and offering it in kit form for the extra budget-conscious.

The other product I spotted was the RC4 wireless dimmer system. These are quite pricey but I'd still recommend them without reservation. I have nothing against hacks but by the time you come up with a working system you will have spent almost as much, and a lot of time you usually can't afford on a theater tech schedule.

And the guy is smart. He's thought of all the things I thought of, and put most of them in the box. A lot of people would just rig a bunch of PWM outputs and call it done. He's recognized the nonlinearity of output and subsequent color rendering, and put in a much more sophisticated version of the gamut look-up table I have running on my Holocrons.

He's also added what he calls Digital Persistence (another thing I've had to do in many of my projects), which is modifying the output so instead of coming on and going off near-instantly, LEDs will behave more like incandescent bulbs. This is easy for him because he's implemented another thing I was using as a paradigm; although direct multi-channel control is the default, his devices can run a baked-in animation in stand-alone mode instead of having to receive a constant stream of instructions.




Okay, I'd still like to see my prop light thing. But skip the wireless stage -- I'm not doing that much theater anymore and it adds too much complexity. Free-running behavior, preferably set through a full-on GUI running on a host computer and uploaded via USB. Built-in LiPo management, because again, AA batteries make more sense in a theatrical context but LiPo makes more sense for cosplay and other replica prop use.

And, here's the thing. Theatrical props, especially, it makes sense from a budget and time standpoint to take something commercial (usually a toy) and throw it in there. Often it is enough that it lights up. But even something more color-critical like a storm lantern or an old radio it's easy enough for theatrical purposes to wrap some gel around it or otherwise get it "close enough."

For a replica prop, there's more of an onus on getting it to look exactly right, so flexibility and programmability are good. But here it makes sense to leverage the mostly-done-for-you end of the hacker spectrum; Arduinos, various lighting boards, neopixel strips, etc. You pay a little more but given how many hours and bucks went into the prop, that's not a real problem.

The exception I still see is when a specific prop places something at a premium. Cost (because you need dozens of duplicates), space, etc.

For instance, my Wraith Stone. What I want it to do requires a dedicated board. And I'm fine with that -- just as I'm fine with people hacking up a $4 LED charm bracelet if that's what works.

Maker Faire 2017: Begin the Begin

And now the Maker Faire rant.

Bay Area Maker Faire (this weekend in San Mateo) was hot and crowded. Neither are the fault of Make or anyone else. To a certain extent "crowded" is a feature; it means tickets were sold, and Make is having trouble financing the Faire already. The heat is by itself not a problem, but combined with crowds you get a lack of access to shade and water that makes the Faire more difficult to endure (especially for those of us who are getting a little older -- or for the many who are bringing little children.)

And it is a given that economics drives the event. Sales (and booth rentals) are what covers the costs. But sales pushes the Faire to be about presentation. And, as with so many things, offering distraction for kids to bring in those parental dollars gradually takes over from any other goal. Maker Faire always had an element of spectacle and an element of hucksterism, but the desire to attract crowds and to have something to offer that will cause parents to bring children means these are eclipsing other aspects.

Aspects like sharing, education, information, trading, and networking.


The rest of the rant/Open Letter below the fold:

Powered by Brains

There has been a push since at least the Industrial Revolution to offload the rote work -- the repetitive, mindless tasks -- onto machinery. The Maker revolution dotes on this, and my personal props work has paralleled; moving to technologies that let me copy and paste details instead of sculpting them individually, using mills and other power tools to achieve desired surfaces instead of hand-smoothing them, etc.

The downside, though, of getting rid of as much of the mindless drudge work as possible, is you don't have mindless drudge work to do when you are tired, sick, it is hot and you just got off a long day's work, you only have an hour before you need to go off and do something else, etc.

I'm looking at a big task list for the Holocron orders right now. Sure, there's some sanding and patching, and some soldering. Those are mindless; I sanded the last one over a couple evenings while watching YouTube.

But before I can even tear into the stack of orders I need to fix a couple remaining issues. I need to do the next round of PCB corrections in Eagle CAD. I need to edit the new solution to the USB jack into the laser SVG's. I need to dial in the sensitivity on the sensor and write a couple of new functions into the software.

None of this is stuff I can do when sleepy or when my head is fuzzy or when I'm distracted. None of them can I do without several consecutive hours to look through the change orders, re-familiarize myself with the parts/functions/software/layers etc., and still have the time to take careful caliper measurements and run tests and otherwise make sure the work is being done accurately. I can't throw any of this at the wall in hopes it will stick. It requires a free day (or at least a free afternoon) with health and no major distractions.

I can't even make up the rest of the stack of version 1.0 PCBs. Because before I can get to the relatively mindless rote of soldering in the discrete components I have to delicately place the surface mount and run a reflow oven cycle. That takes the kind of steady hand that does not come after the fourth cup of coffee and in any case requires a free hour or more for setup and cleanup.

The line continues to move, of course. Code crunching is increasingly moving to automation now. PCB is automated (if you like the results, which I don't). But of course that merely amplifies the problem. Because then the work that needs to be done so the project can progress is the intense concentration of original insight and artistic thought.

And, yeah, you can (and I've been forced to, on more than one theatrical design contract) reach into your bucket of trite old ideas, recycled ideas, and stolen ideas. And the people around you will still coo and aw about how creative you are.

But it isn't as good and it really doesn't feel right. Every single lighting design I've done for theater has involved me spending at least two hours doing nothing but sitting in a chair in the auditorium staring at the set. My average is a week of back-burner, of thinking off and on about the show, making scribbles, re-reading the script, etc., until the idea finally comes.

Fortunately, that kind of necessary percolation does seem to be entirely compatible with being tired, sick, busy, hot, whatever. It just needs the world to spin a few times before the ideas are ready to take full form.

Bass Canards

Passed the worst of it. Money came into my Paypal. Then my late paycheck arrived. I put in a full day at work. And I mailed off the latest set of M40 grenades. I even got a little fiddle practice in.

One of the reasons I've been behind on the fiddle practice is I've been using my breaks to tinker with an acoustic experiment. I bet I could get it declared a "20 percenter." Considering we do, well, acoustic design at work. Or rather, the company does. I reload coffee machines.

So what I built was an experimental Cajon. These are drums made in the form of (and historically, from) wooden boxes. Because of the nature of the sounding surface (or tapa), there are a variety of different sounds that one can get from one, including a reasonable approximation of the basic kick-tom-snare setup.

I was cutting from scrap wood, so I used slightly smaller and non-standard dimensions. But what I really wanted to explore was the idea of porting.

See, the box itself functions as a Helmholz Resonator. Not the perfect spherical one, however. Like a guitar body, the acoustics are a complex blend of the air mass inside the volume of the cavity communicating with the outside through the tone hole and modified by the flexible materials making up the body itself. This is even more complex in a cajon as one side of the box is the drum head itself -- which has specific resonance modes itself (multiple modes, in fact, with different combinations of strength of the various nodes excited depending on where the surface is struck).

According to a university acoustics lab experiment I read, even though the 0,0 node of the tapa is around 110 Hz, there exists a second peak of acoustic energy of the cavity. They were studying how this is modified by changing the diameter of the tone hole.

Well, I thought I'd see if I could emphasize low frequencies by using a cabinet design trick; by porting the hole. Adding a tube extension essentially lowers the emphasized frequency. This, at least, can be readily calculated. I didn't bother, as I was making this from available scrap. Instead I simply experimented.

Adding the port instantly cut much of the supporting resonance in the 200-400 hz range. Which is where the strongest most characteristic strike tone had been. It brought in a new peak of strongly boosted frequencies centered at about 50 Hz for the tube length shown above. The wadding (which I added to before closing the box) was designed and effectively did muffle most of the original "box" tone, leaving almost nothing but the "slap" of hand on wood and a deep powerful thump much like that you'd get from a good kick drum.



Unfortunately another part of the experiment was not as successful. It did not seem possible to selectively reduce the damping (and the effect of the porting) to allow richer, more tom-like tones in other strike zones. Nor was I entirely happy with the "slap" of the loose edge I designed for a snare-like effect (too woody, although it did have a good slap. I can put more sizzle in by adding guitar string under it, but I'm afraid this might be audible in the "kick" as well).

If and when I get back to this (I saved a few other pieces of scrap wood) the next experiment is going to be making a bongo-cajon but using partial baffles instead of airtight partitioning. I'll see how the two air volumes communicate and interact.


A little more on-line research and I found some good technical discussion at a Cajon builder's forum. And, yes, the porting trick is well known -- there's a pair intersection between Cajon builders and speaker builders. There's also a style of Cajon playing (and building) that aims for a close approximation of kick-and-snare (and, somehow, hat). 

But I find I side with the larger community in that I miss the "wooden" tone of the classical Cajon. That is, the 200-400 Hz range which my ported and damped experiment specifically reduced. However, based on a slightly better understanding of the underlying math (one day I'll get around to reading the rest of that book I have on musical acoustics) I've decided to pre-calculate the dimensions (particularly the critical sound hole dimension) of the planned Bongo Cajon.

Holocron history

This prop took forever. But there is reason for it. Basically, it isn't "a" prop. There wasn't a straight-forward design process from a base idea through a directed iterative exploration.

I was handed a kit to assemble and paint. I'd just been introduced to laser cutting and engraving, though, and I thought I could pimp it up a little.

The experiments worked. Well enough I ended up documenting the project for Instructables. And that's where the trouble started.

Enough people at Instructables showed an interest that I made my files available. Since some of the parts weren't originally mine, I had to come up with designs for those, as well.


It was through Instructables that I was contacted by the master of a Jedi Temple, wanting a custom design made for his students. I agreed to work on it. Many emails and iterations and a full free kit shipped out no charge and I stopped being able to shake the feeling that he wasn't actually going to be good for the cost of the final kits. So I parted ways with that customer.

Since I now had a new and tested shell design I tried for a while to generate a new holocron based around it. But I didn't like (and still don't like) and of the results.

The holocron does not yet appear in any movie. It appears in some games and animations; one appearance being the best documented appearance I've been able to find. This natural goal was blocked, however, by the seeming impossibility of achieving it with the materials at hand. So I continued tinkering with other alternate designs, trying to fold in various motifs from the Star Wars universe.

It was at that juncture that I opened an interest thread at the Replica Props Forum. I got strong interest there, but still couldn't satisfy myself with the design.

Took a break to work on other projects. Did the Retro Raygun, some other things. My Croft necklace was also a hit, and I gave it away on long-term loan, which led me to starting the Wraith Stone project, and that looked to require some advanced electronics, so I picked up the holocron project again just to be able to work out the charge circuit and load sharing and surface-mount issues on a simpler board than what I intended for the Wraith Stone.

And when I returned to the holocron, what I had seen as an unsolvable problem turned out to be trivial. The critical insight might have been a function introduced on the new lasers just installed at TechShop; vector engraving. In any case, I immediately moved to front position a design much more closely based on that one animation.

It is just different enough from my first holocron, though, that the lighting didn't look right anymore. So back to some very basic development to rethink how the lighting circuit interacts.

And, of course, late in the day I realized there were possible ways to get it to look even more like my selected source. The very first holocron was a three-layer model; painted shell, solid diffusion layer, then the vector-cut "circuit" layer. I finally broke through this paradigm -- first through having to add a diffusor cube, then through realizing an inner "hypercube" might be an even closer match to what was seen on screen.

And that's where I am right now; cutting out yet more test pieces to see if this idea works out, while my growing list of confirmed customers are demanding I let them give me money...

Which is of course the absolutely perfect time for a major change at my day job.

Holocron N

The new boards arrived early; I didn't expect them until Monday.

I did make one mistake with my parts orders; I got some 100 ohm resistors instead of the 100K I needed. Hopefully I can compensate. Just got done placing components one by one on the first assembly and it is in the T-962 right now.

And, so far, so good. Had a bad hour or so when the neopixel didn't respond, but after splicing it into a previous circuit board to test it, realized the problem might be with the fuse setting on the AVR. Which it proved -- and thank you, since version 1.0 of the Arduino IDE you can burn those fuses automagically from the console. But I'll get some sleep before I test the charge circuit.

Yesterday I lasered again, mostly re-designing the internal diffusion cube to work better with the circuit board. If it all works I should be able to finally assemble a complete prototype with proper lighting (diffusion cube test, with an ad-hoc light source propped inside, in the picture below):

The sales thread at the RPF is started now and I've had eight requests for a fully assembled model. I have promised to show how some of the alternates look before I take the orders, though. Last night I also lasered out a partial set of the new "Sentinel" diffusion pattern (that's a Jedi symbol surrounded by a "koan" in Aurabesh). I didn't have a chance to cut circuitry, though, nor have I finished either the "Steampunk" circuitry design or the final of three planned diffusion patterns (which I'm calling the "Guardian" pattern publicly, but it is mostly inspired by Doctor Who.)

I also have to tweak the programming. That will take a bit. One depressing thing I've discovered is after all that tweaking for best possible fit, the width of the cut (and the resulting tightness of fit) is largely dependent on how the laser is feeling that day.



I also have to fill a promise to a very patient lad in Germany for a couple Pulse Rifle grenades and some rounds to go with them. I have a half-dozen bodies from my last run, just awaiting the buttons to be installed. Which is a full four-hour slot on the lathe and precision work, which is why I haven't felt up to it yet. The rounds I'll make a try at doing on the M3d but I'm worried about the quality.

This is more fully-assembled holocrons than I had hoped to have to build. I need to clean up the work area and assembly-line them. But now that the holocron is mostly a solved problem, I can move on to the next props projects. My feeling is, the priority projects now are two; a Morrow Project laser for my friend;

And a Wraith Stone for me. The former may be a great excuse for traditional prop building -- to get away from the machining and CAD and so forth I've been doing lately, and get back for at least a little to balsa and paint.

The latter combines several technologies. I dived back into the Holocron as a "simpler" project to learn surface-mount electronics and Lithium Polymer charge circuits. The Wraith Stone is going to require both:

My intention is also to carve it in semi-traditional style -- MDF, Apoxie Sculpt, etc. -- but then to scan it, print it, then cast it in order to achieve the kind of detail level and materials qualities I want.

Pity no-one else expressed an interest in the Retro Raygun, though. I still need to take it back and swap out the speaker and LED for more powerful models, but otherwise any concern I may have had about keeping the working files is fast ebbing.

(And when I borrow it back, I'm also going to take some proper pictures!)