the wondrous tales of a software guy in hardwareland

Happy Blogversary To Me!

The 14th of March may be celebrated as Pi Day in countries with funny date format, but few know that it’s also… this blog’s birthday! :-)

It’s been 1 exact year since my first post, so let’s look at what happened in excruciating details.

First of all, I spent (roughly counted) 320€ so far. That’s 26.66€/month. Not exactly a cheap hobby, but that was mostly the initial setup. I’m spending much less lately. And if I can resist a couple tentations (yes, raspi and Due, I’m looking at you) I think this average is going to decrease significantly.

On this blog, I wrote 17 posts, at a pace of 1.41 posts per month, or one post every 22.87 days. On average, one of my posts is 712.58 words long and contains 1.82 images.

I also uploaded 2 videos on Youtube, which were viewed 31 and 36 times, as well as 2 “sound checks” on Soundcloud, listened to 27 and 11 times.

On the “social” side, I got a grand total of 0 Facebook likes, 0 Google +1 and 5 tweets (all by me of course). Also, 0 comments. But 87 spam comments. Because when you feel alone on the Internet and nobody seems to care about you, you can always count on spammers :-)

Regarding web analytics, this site has an average of 122.58 unique visitors and 466.75 pageviews per month.

Ok, I think I’ll stop here with the numbers. You should have a pretty desolating picture already :-)

Let’s review my goals instead, as stated in my first post::

  1. Build a CV/gate sequencer for my (to be hacked) monotron
  2. See how far I can push the MidiVox
  3. Learn something about analog audio synthesis
  4. Verify how much I can teach my kid (and myself) about electronics, programming and getting awesome things done
  5. Have fun

Point 1 is still taking up pretty much all my time. I built a prototype, a half-assed, semi-abandoned, alpha-quality perfboard version and I’m currently planning the hopefully final incarnation. But I can’t complain, really. I’m confident it’s going to be ready for Christmas :-)

As a consequence of point 1, points 2 and 3 are basically no-op. That poor MidiVox shield sits unused in a drawer since one year… On the other hand, I think I got some basic ideas regarding analog synthesis. I also bought a whole lot of cool chips (LM13700, CD4046, just to name a few), but didn’t get to do anything really. I think what’s putting me off is mainly power. Those circuit usually requires ±9V (or ±12V) and ground, which is still kind of an obstacle to me. I feel much more comfortable with Arduino’s single-rail 5V :-)

Point 4 is… the meh point. Sure, I learned a lot. But getting awesome things done? Not really. Not yet. My kid prefers other activities. And rightly so. Zero points on this one.

But point 5, oh, point 5 is the shoot in the bull’s eye :-) Yes, I had a lot of fun. And I made mistakes! Real mistakes, my friends. False assumptions! Wrong decisions! Oh, the joy.

No, seriously, it has been fun. Still is. And it can only get better next year.

Many happy returns to me!

cheers,
Aldo

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