Author: todbot

me okay
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Oberheim Matrix 6r firmware update!

I upgraded the firmware on my beloved-but-long-unused 1986 Oberheim Matrix 6r! These synths are the royalty of analog fatness. I love their sound. This is the result I was looking for:

It’s remarkably clean inside for a machine made in 1986. I acquired it used in the early 90s.

Just look at the bank of six voices. The CEM3396 chips are the VCF/VCA chips that give this synth its distinctive lushness. And made each voice circuit like 5x smaller than possible just a few years earlier.

The firmware upgrade was just a simple EPROM swap. Out with the old, in with the new! I got the chip from a chap on Reverb who’s using new EPROM stock (not old ceramic parts) The firmware update itself allows the Matrix to be used with modern MIDI patch editors and is a testament of amazing microcontroller assembly language hacking. Check out the page by the author of the Matrix firmware update. Thank you so much!

And the result is the same as before the upgrade: it still sounds glorious.

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HIDPyToy – GUI to test USB HID devices

Here is HIDPyToy. It’s a small app written in PyQt using the hid Python package to talk to USB HID devices (like Teensy RawHID or blink(1) USB RGB LEDs). Pre-build binaries are available for MacOS and Windows.

HIDPyToy allows you to exercise pretty much the entire hidapi library from Python. You can:

  • List for all HID devices on a system
  • Send OUT reports, with or without Report Ids
  • Send FEATURE reports, with or without Report Ids
  • Receive IN reports, with or without Report Ids
  • Receive FEATURE reports, with or without Report Ids

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Hackaday HalloWing case

One of the goodies from the Hackaday Superconference was an Adafruit HalloWing. And I thought: surely a Jolly Wrencher case must be made for this skull-shaped circuit board! How has no one made of these yet?

So I remixed an existing clip-on case that fits the included battery (Thanks DoctorWhich!), added the Jolly Wrenches and printed it out. It came out pretty great. Though now I wish I had some black PLA.

Here’s a video showing it:

See also:
– https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3238536
– https://hackaday.io/project/162452-hackaday-hallowing-case

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Replacing the battery in a Macbook Pro Retina (late 2013)

I really like the generation previous to the current Macbook Pros. You know the ones. They had all the useful ports like USB-A, HDMI, an SD Card slot, and MagSafe!  And it had a long-lived battery in a thin case. That is my Macbook Pro. And it’s wonderful.

But now 3.5 years on, the once legendary battery was at about half its design capacity. I got 1600 charge cycles out of it though, which is astounding.  And it still worked, unlike a previous Macbook’s battery that ended up getting a bad cell that caused it to unceremoniously shutdown at 20%.  So I replaced it and I think it is working out great.

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