Category: Gallery🖼️

Has a pictures or screenshots gallery.

2005 Keyboards CK1,2 ⌨️
⏱️Overview

This is an older topic with less information, just for history purpose. If you’re interested see my newer keyboards or the newest ones, with more explanation, own controller and display.

These were my first modifications for keyboards.

They were both done on a Logitech Ultra X Flat, a well done, solid keyboard. Surprisingly different for same model made after 1 year.

✍️Motivation

Originally most keyboards have about 50 gram force needed to press keys, and probably 4 mm distance. After first step of cutting rubber domes the distance is about 1-2mm, the force was about 22 gram for CK1 (bottom) and 33g for CK2 (top). This can also be varied per key.

📊Features

The second step was removing the middle part with arrows. Which I find unnecessary and worse (less keys) than the same from numpad. In CK1 I’ve bent the foil and hid it under. It was risky, but the foil survived. The CK2 was different, it was made from two identical keyboards, thus no need to bend, only cut the metal and foil. That too was risky since the foil could have connections around the cut off part. It was only for numpad, the bigger part had whole foil under.

Years later I modified CK2 further and bent the foil to create CK4 keyboard. And that’s 11 years already, so this would answer any doubts for longevity of such modifications. The number of times I disassembled it, changed something, and put it together is also quite high.

The third step was adding extra keys. Using my oldest program for showing pressed keys and their codes, I figured out that there are more possible keys in keyboard matrix, that are just not connected. So I added them with wires and glued on keyboards. First as regular switches with metal domes, small and hard to press. Later using rubber switches, lighter to press. But turned out to be an even bigger fail since they wear out and stop connecting. They have some resistance too (like maybe 300 ohm) in addition to the resistance of foil traces (maybe 150 ohm). So finally I ended with the smallest metal dome switch I found, with force 0.5 N (50gf). It feels different than other keys but otherwise is good.

📷Galleries

The old galleries from my keyboards:

CK2 final (2008)
CK1 and 2 making of (2005 and 2006)
17/04/2005
2003-04 Distortion X 🎸
⏱️Overview

“Distortion X – The Great” was my final version of an analog guitar effect from 2004, and looked similar in 2003 already.

📊Features

It had a Distortion, Reverb / Echo and 2 Equalizers (9 and 18 bands).

The Distortion featured such regulations:
- Switch for Clean / Distorted mode, pink LED
- Clean Volume
- Drive (i.e. Distortion, Amplification)
- Low Pass (filter frequency)
- High Pass (filter frequency)
- Balance (mix between the two filters)
Reverb was made on the longer analog line MN3008.

It had only 3 potentiometers (knobs):
- Delay (i.e. Length: short would do Reverb and long did Echo, at reduced bandwidth)
- Feedback (how much from output was summed back to input)
- Volume (output mix between Reverb and clean)
- Switch to turn on/off, white LED
Equalizers were used only one at once. By default the Narrow one (9 bands) was for Clean mode and Wide (18 bands) was for Distorted, thus allowing more customization. Narrow had violet LED on left, and Wide had orange, on right.

It also had 2 switched, one would exchange Narrow with Wide (so the opposite to default, Narrow for Distorted). And other switch was to turn equalization off, mainly just to check the difference, most left, red-orange LED.

For a moment it had also the short Reverb / Flanger board with knobs, visible on pictures. But I didn’t use it. Power supply for it was different (not symmetrical) and that added more noise.

📜History

I was developing analog effects for electric guitar since we started playing in 2001. There were several versions of it. The 1st was just a distortion. The 5th had one 9 band equalizer and I think also a Reverb / Flanger on short delay line MN3007. The 8th was similar but had 18 band equalizer and long Reverb / Echo.

Since I was playing backgrounds and my friend solos, we needed 2 effects. The 5th and 8th were separate and best combination. I was naming them using Roman numerals, so this one, X was the 10th and last version.

⏳Conclusions

In 2004 I bought a digital effect, Digitech RP 200A, and first realized the huge difference between analog and digital effects. It was very feature rich and the sound quality was much better (probably like 20dB more, I guess my analog could be about 70dB SNR at best). Digital had many more effects like Chorus, Detune, realistic Reverb, high quality Echo, Cabinet models etc, and was stereo. But that model was very poor in regulations, there was only one parameter for each effect that could be changed (whole effect had only 3 nobs).

So even though it was higher quality and had more features (but less regulations), I still used my Distortion for some time. Also since the digital sound and because we started college we stopped playing together so often and then at all. Also we had the digital one so I could just put all equalizers and reverbs in one. Then I finished it with a better case (from an Audio CD Recorder, which internals I moved to a worse case).

➡️End

I sold it recently. For a ridiculous price, maybe just summing up to what parts had cost me. But there was a lot of time dedicated to developing it and making PCBs. But still, I’m glad I freed up cabinet space and didn’t have to throw it out (too sentimental to do that). Also got some money for it and somebody could find it useful or maybe even educational. I sold my guitars that year too. They were just gathering dust for too many years.

It was great for what it was. It was the best I could make of what was possible at the time. Recently I thought a few times already, about how much easier and more advanced a digital effect processor could be made. For example Teensy 4.0 has a lot of power, ADC and DAC are available nowadays as codec chips rather cheaply and Teesny seems to be popular for music devices and similar projects. Maybe even slower MCUs could that earlier. Earlier I have even searched and found an already open source guitar effect, I forgot which was it, but searchin now gives even more results.

📷Gallery

Also with pictures of inside and schematics.
10/08/2004
2002-03 Tracker SXIV 🎶
⏱️Overview

This is the music tracker program I wrote around 2002-2003, in Delphi 5.

It was 800×600 on a 17″ CRT back then, so already 4 screens fit now.

✍️Motivation

I was having fun with Scream Tracker on DOS before, so it felt best for creating music and using only keyboard for that.

I called my program simply the same way, but started with version 6 and increased until 14. Then shorted it to just S and used Roman numerals XIV.

This was such an awesome program to use and look at. Mainly because keyboard shortcuts were customized to what I wanted, and also I implemented many quite useful operations in it, e.g. in patterns editor.

🔍Implementation

It was using GLScene package for Delphi and my colored bitmap fonts from another program (it was the predecessor to Crystal Font), hence so varying and colorful texts everywhere.

By default I also used colored image backgrounds, since pages felt really empty. It even had animated text transitions for title pages text and a toggleable fire animation in corner 🔥.

But it was complete garbage at the way sound creation was done. It simply relied on a system timer event and triggered sound playing from DirectSound buffers. I know, nobody does that for music. I didn’t know any other way to code this then.

Timer was more or less stable, but I had to render very little while playing, mostly empty screen and 1 bottom line of info.

🎵Music

I made about 5 songs with it, more here. Also used it for percussion patterns when we were both playing electric guitars.

Later I was checking out Renoise, but eventually my interest faded away from creating music.

Recently I found Furnace tracker (for chiptune music) to be very cool and FOSS, sources here.

📷Gallery
07/10/2003
2000-01 Drawings 🖌️
⏱️Overview

These are decorative texts, drawn on paper. I was using (up to) about 26 colorful gel pens and few regular ballpoint pens too. The text in this picture is Experience (my favorite one).

✍️Motivation

Back in technical high school I was very disappointed at the level of education there (mainly stuff from 1980). And also extremely bored, especially on history and Polish (literature) lessons 🥱.

After all, that stuff was already in the elementary school, and I thought I will get rid of those crappy non technical subjects.

I never accepted the garbage I had to learn and did only bare minimum. There was no chemistry at all and history was for 4 (of 5) years? Now that was serious bullshit 😡.

So yeah, this was my sudden and creative outcome at the time, which (at least partially) fixed the boredom and made something cool with the time. I didn’t expect it would happen.

🔍Details

The words in pictures from gallery are as follows:
- Cathedral, Catedral (t upside down), Experience, Revolution, Reality. The rest is easy to tell.
The green crystal hammer style is quite different and funny, normal one is the violet.
There is also the eye gem symbol, a simpler version from my later painting. I only drew 2D things.

📷Gallery

Full gallery with more below:
12/03/2001