Maker Faire

The Maker Faire was an annual or semi-annual celebration for Makers and Builders that took place at the Centre for Life in our home city of Newcastle. I used to love these events. I really did. They were an opportunity to meet fellow makers, to see what they’d been doing and what we could do to keep up. They also gave us a target to aim for and an immutable deadline for getting products finished.

The success of any particular Maker Faire was usually down to our location. A good location meant we’d see lots of foot fall, lots of visitors, lots of opportunities to demonstrate our kit. A bad location meant no visitors at all, as was obvious when we tried to host Synthfest in 2011. More on that later.

Here's a short list of some of the products / projects that demonstrated at various Maker Faire events between 2012 and 2017.

Haydn Sequencer (Prototype)

I wanted to produce a small, palm-sized sequencer that would deliver most of ZEIT’s functionality in a form factor that would be less time-consuming and less expensive to manufacture. Haydn 01-00 was the result.

More or less a ZEIT in a smaller box, Haydn featured sixteen steps and perhaps more menus than was wise or sensible but it worked and taught us a thing or two about designing user interfaces. I loved the coloured buttons and that fact that, once you got acclimatised to the user interface, you could do pretty much anything with Haydn that you could with ZEIT. However...

Haydn Sequencer (Full sized)

I soon got fed up with trying to program the palm-sized Haydn and switched to a design that was half-way between a full-sized ZEIT and an ATEM. I liked the form factor. I liked the faders. I liked the big, bright display. I didn’t like the lack of LEDs, the lack of a second Midi interface or the lack of USB. As good as this instrument was, it was years behind the competition.

That said, I still plan on finishing this machine off in one form or another. Watch this space for a more modern, up-to-date implementation.

Wave-D Synthesiser

The Wave-D was a PPG-clone long before cloning instruments became fashionable. I downloaded a copy of the PPG Wave 2.2 wavetables, which I burned into an Atmel micro running at 16 MHz. I then wrote a couple of basic oscillator algorithms that would make a sound via a crude eight-bit resistor-ladder DAC. The final signal was a bit rough but it very definitely had that characteristic PPG tone. A bit more tweaking followed and you could walk through the wavetables one by one or use the modulation wheel to change the timbre.

I soon realised that the microprocessor had enough power to implement a crude low pass filter and that really made the instrument sound pretty sweet. Envelope generators came next and the end result was a crude but workable synthesiser.

We demo’d the instrument at Maker Faire 2014 and the unit generated a lot of interest, perhaps too much interest. To learn what happened next, click here.

Plasma Synthesiser

Plasma Synthesiser I got fed up with listening to synths that were all beautiful swirling pads and acres of reverb, pristine pulses and huge Moog basses so I designed a digital synth with as many errors and points of instability inside its algorithms as possible. At one end of the scale, you’d have a workable monophonic synth that sounded just about acceptable. At the other end of the scale, you’d have a beast that was barely controllable. And it worked. Plasma proved enormously popular, mostly because those mad enough to give it a try really wanted to see if they could figure out why it sounded so gritty, so in-ya-face, so utterly deranged. The key is randomly dropping bits in your calculations so that the output from one stage deliberately overloads the input to the next. Do the same with the flanger algorithm, and any other algorithm you can hack, and you have a sound design tool that is incomparable to any other synth. That said, it was just about impossible to predict what Plasma would do next though. Plasma remains one of my favourite cul-de-sacs. It's a project I'd love to return to one small day.

PolyMod

PolyMod was an experimental four channel software-based pattern sequencer that we first developed in 2012. As the name implies the application was essentially four independent function generators that would send note and controller messages to any number of MIDI channels. In addition, each function generator had its own Midi effects unit, internal / external sync, force-to-scale, keyboard transpose etc. Sound familiar? Visually, the user interface was quite fascinating with the modulating waveform for each channel shown on its own software oscilloscope.

Programmed entirely in Java using the Processing Development Environment, the pilot application was usable but had two major faults. Firstly, the Midi library provided with Processing was awful. It would drop incoming notes or leave them latched. Accurate timing was impossible. Secondly, as a workaround, I wrote my own Midi timing library but Processing would then run so hard that the laptop’s fans would switch on full blast and your battery life would drop by 10% to 20% whilst the piece was playing.

Eventually, when I got sick and tired of recharging my MacBook after just thirty minutes, I dropped the output side of the application and moved Midi timing over an independent Arduino board with multiple Midi interfaces. The host program was downgraded to just a graphical front end communicating with the external board via Midi System Exclusive messages. This incarnation was much more successful and could produce some really interesting evolving sequences. However, I soon realised that I could still do everything that PolyMod could ever do with a ZEIT.

That was more than thirteen years ago and time has moved on. Processing has turned into OpenProcessing, and now offers much more functionality and significantly better Midi support. In addition, we now have the Mozart external Midi board which runs over USB and supports Web Midi.

Maybe now is the time to revisit the project.

Launchpad

Launchpad was a Java-application written using the Processing Development Environment, which sat between my MacBook and a Novation Launchpad and changed the colours of the LEDs from a colour I can’t see into a colour that I can see. Yes, I’m colourblind (red / green to be specific) and the LEDs on the Launchpad were exactly the shade of green I can’t see. When the unit apparently didn’t work, I made a short video to illustrate the problem and... lo, the LEDs worked after all but... I couldn't see them.

Novation suggested a couple of workarounds but were largely unwilling to fix the problem for me and so I was left with a controller that did work but then didn’t. Hence, the Launchpad application. I still wasn’t able to use Ableton but I could use the Launchpad to control a bunch of other modules.

We also added a couple of novelty products to bring in the visitors...

Musical Staircase

The Musical Staircase was the prototype for an instrument we’d been invited to install at a major entertainment venue in the Midlands. Alas, that didn’t happen but we installed the prototype at the 2014 Maker Faire. Visitors could run up and down or dance on the stairs and the sound generator would produce a sequence of musical notes as they moved. The staircase proved very, very popular with small children and young adults but we withdrew the item completely after a gentleman of more generous proptions decided to have a go... and pretty much snapped the frame in two.

Light Harp

The Light Harp was an attempt to replicate Jean-Michel Jarre’s Laser Harp and it too proved astonishingly popular. The design was simple enough - a crude frame was assembled from electrical trunking. The upper cross beam was fitted with eight very bright LEDS whilst the lower beam was fitted with a matching number of light-dependent resistors (LDRs). The voltages from the LDRs were sampled by an Arduino Mega 2560 and converted into Midi Notes. To make a sound, the player interrupted the beams of light and an attached synthesiser made all sorts of interesting noises. We still had people queuing up to play this instrument long after the centre had closed. This is another of my very favourite projects and one that I plan on revisiting now that we have children of our own who will love this device as much as we did.

Not all visitors to our Maker Faire stand were welcome. As you can see, we had one or two issues with a cadre of Galactic Storm Troopers, who were never far away. You just got used to them after a while but, every now and then, they'd pick on some unfortunate in their hunt for Rebel Scum.

Alas, our local Maker Faire events stopped in 2017 and, as far as I know, no further events will be scheduled in this part of the world. According to sources at Life, these events were expensive to host and very disruptive to normal operations. Worse, the footfall was highly variable and was very dependent upon the weather and if Newcastle United were playing at home. Personally, I feel that the organisers lost the plot when they decided to host a huge cookery event in the main hall, which meant most of the exhibitors (like us) were stuffed away outside in a tent. I wouldn't have minded so much if a gale-force wind hadn't threatened to bring down our tent around our ears. Not much fun, frankly. That said, attendance was well down on previous years and I knew as soon as the final bell sounded that this would be our last Maker Faire. Sad it see it go, frankly but, such is life.