I’ve been playing a lot of Sega Saturn shoot ‘em ups lately, but I’m not a big fan of the official arcade stick for the Saturn.  I was also looking for a wood working project to try out my CNC mill with, so I decided a custom arcade stick might be a fun weekend project.

Cutting the sides on my micRo CNC machine:

Testing the fit on the sides:

Cutting the top of the controller:

Doing one last test fit before gluing it all together.

I pad hacked a third party Saturn controller I got off eBay for $5. Worked out great.

Some pics of the finished stick. I also CNCed a lexan panel to go over the artwork, which is just a laminated inkjet print. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.

In my various DIY experiments I often find that I need special parts created.  That part could be a control panel, circuit board, special bracket, or an endless number of other things that have to be custom made for a particular project.  Usually these custom parts are the most expensive aspect of the the DIY hobby.  Circuit boards and engraved control panels can cost anywhere between $30-$100 each.  Custom machined parts can be even more ridiculous, unless you can find a fellow DIY-er with better equipment to help you out.

Every time I spend a chunk of cash on one of these one-off designs I end up wishing I could just buy the tools to build them myself.  Up until recently those tools (usually some form of computer controlled drill or mill) cost $2,000-$3,000 for anything close to the accuracy I would need.  Thankfully, that has finally changed.

The fine folks at Lumenlab have recently unveiled their latest robotic manufacturing workstation, the micRo.  Now for a fraction of the cost I can have my own computer controlled drilling/milling machine to make circuit boards, cut and label control panels, and do hundreds of other cool things.

After a week of obsessing, I finally placed my order.  Unfortunately, the micRo seems to be so popular that it may take a month or two until I actually get my kit.  In the mean time, I’ve scored a cheap Dell PC that will serve as my new robot’s brain.  I should be able to keep myself busy getting it set up and learning about all the software that I’ll need to make this thing work.

Look for some more micRo/CNC posts in the future!

I decided to do a slightly more advanced version of my MIDI Shield this weekend.  It has MIDI in and out just like my prototype, but also has two LEDs, two buttons, two potentiometers, and a photocell.  All the additional components are optional, so if I just need a simple MIDI interface for a particular project I won’t have to bother with soldering on the extra stuff.

I finished up the PCB design today, but I had to make the board double sided, so I can’t make a prototype at home.  It’ll probably take two or three weeks to get my new prototype back from BatchPCB, but I’ll post some more info once it arrives.  Hopefully I have all the bugs worked out and I won’t need to do any additional revisions.

If my full version generates enough interest I’ll probably sell the boards, or even produce a small run of kits.  I’ll also release the board files and schematics under the creative commons license once I know I have all the kinks worked out.

Here’s a sneak peek of what the layout will look like:

I picked up an Arduino microcontroller and a few shields from Lady Ada last week.  I use PIC microcontrollers quite a bit, but I’ve been wanting to switch over to the Atmel AVR because it has better support for C programming.  The Arduino is AVR-based and their IDE uses C so it looked like a good place to start.

One of the things that makes the Arduino so cool are the “shields” you can buy.  They stick on top of the Arduino and let you add additional functionality without the need to breadboard or worry about which wire goes to which pin.  I’ve seen shields for motor controllers, wave playback, LCD screens, ethernet…just about anything you can imagine.  However, I was surprised that no one had come out with a MIDI shield.  I had seen a few posts on the Arduino forums about people breadboarding MIDI interfaces, but no one had bothered making a shield.  My main use for microcontrollers is for music projects, so I decided to make my own.

MIDI I/O isn’t too terribly hard, so it only took me an evening to draw up the schematic, design a circuit board, and etch a prototype.  I made a few minor mistakes, hence the green jumper wires in the photos below.  Still, not bad for an evening of screwing around with Eagle and playing with volatile chemicals.  In fact, it was easy enough that I might just get real boards manufactured and flesh this out into a complete kit to sell on the site.  I can’t be the only person out there who wants to play around with MIDI on the Arduino.  Maybe I’ll add a few knobs, a light sensor and a button or two to version 2.0.  That way people could have a few more options for manipulating MIDI data.

A few years ago I purchased an FC Twin and went on a NES and SNES cartrige buying spree, but a lot of the games I really wanted (RPGs, mostly) were incredibly expensive. I also wanted to play some of the Japanese RPGs and platformers that never made it over to the states, but those required a Japanese SNES and any ROMs that had been translated to English required an emulator.

As much as I love emulators, they just aren’t the same as playing on the real hardware. I have a PC hooked up to my TV that I’ve used with NES and SNES emulators in the past, but I’d much rather use the FC Twin or my SNES if I’m going to sit down and do some serious playing. For years I wished I could buy a flash cart for my SNES that worked the same way my Gameboy, GBA, and DS flash carts did.

It took some hunting, but there are a few dark corners of the interweb that provide just such a device. The one I found is made by Tototek. It works with about 90% of the SNES ROMs out there, and more importantly, works with homebrew and modded SNES ROMs, which includes the fan-translated RPGs. The device can also copy SNES carts for creating your own ROMs, and is capable of copying and writing save games to original SNES carts. The only ROMs it won’t work with are ones that required additional chips. Super Mario RPG, Mario Cart, Pilotwings, Star Fox, Yoshi’s Island, and the Mega Man X games are just about the only “good” games that fall into this category. I already own cartridges for all of these, so this really wasn’t an issue for me.

My only gripe is that the flasher requires a parallel port, so any laptop users are out of luck. Luckily I just switched from a laptop to a desktop, so this isn’t an issue for me. It might make using this thing a little tough in another 4 or 5 years, though.

A couple of years ago I built a modular synthesizer based on circuit designs from Ray Wilson and Ken Stone. Last summer I built an additional synth cabinet with the intention of adding a bunch of new modules from several other DIY synth gurus. For some reason it’s taken me almost a year to get motivated enough to start building modules, but the first two are finally ready. These are actually Ray Wilson circuits that I couldn’t fit in the first cab, but I’m short on envelope generators so I decided to build these first. I’ve also got a Ray Wilson sequencer that I’m hoping to finish next. After that it should be all new circuit designs, including quite a few of Thomas Henry’s circuits.

I got a ridiculously good deal on a Juno 60 synth over the holidays. For an instrument that’s nearly as old as I am it’s in surprisingly good shape, but it’s lack of MIDI soon became a problem. I’m a fairly poor synth player, so I rely heavily on MIDI so that I can program parts that I’d never actually be able to play in real life. No MIDI left me stuck with my rather limited abilities whenever I wanted to use the Juno in a song.

The Juno 60 was released about a year or so before MIDI became the standard and instead has Roland’s own MIDI-like DCB protocol. There have been several DCB to MIDI adapters released over the years, but they’re all big clunky boxes. If I was going to add MIDI to my Juno, I wanted it to be built into the synth and not in some external box I would have to lug around.

After a little hunting I found Engineers@Work, a company in the Netherlands that had exactly what I was looking for. They sell an add-on board that can be soldered into the existing DCB wiring to convert the DCB signals to MIDI. It even fits into the same hole as the old DCB connector so I didn’t have to drill any new holes in the Juno.