This is the first gadget from my Best Wishes line. It is basically a light organ circuit built from Kemo modules built inside a (Best Wishes) pencil case. It has one input for audio and a potentiometer to adjust the sensitivity. When plugged in mains it starts to flash lights connected to its output channels (one for low frequencies, one for high and one for silence). Or actually you can use it to drive any transformerless electric gadget running on 240V.

Light organ units usually do the dimming by chopping the sine waveform in such a nasty way that it might be easy to saturate a transformer connected to it. Though I don’t know what that actually means, it probably does not mean anything good, so don’t do it! Anyways, I find light organ units quite usable piece of electronics. Say, if you need to have a computer or a microcontroller flashing lights, you only need to figure out a simple way of making noise with them, and then just plug it in and you have a zero latency system. And they are cheap.

Here you see the case opened. It includes two ready made Kemo modules: the light organ unit and a noise filter unit. Noise filter takes care that the circuit doesn’t feed any noise to the mains voltage. Also remember the fuse. Putting one of these together is quite straight forward thing to do, but as we are making 240V connections, I advice you not to try this at home … ever!

This is second gadget from my Best Wishes line. It is used for controlling playback of different audio samples via USB on a computer. It has an USB Arduino inside that sends serial data back to the computer. The computer is running a simple program which is using FMod Music & Sound Effects System. This basically means that you are making sound banks using FMod Designer. As you can run FMod dlls in all major OSs (Linux, Windows, OSX…), the implementation is platform independent. I have used both EEEPC 701 and PowerPC G4 as host computer and they both run fine.

It works like this: The potentiometer is actually a rotating switch which you use for choosing right sample bank. Switches are then used to start and stop samples in that bank. Buttons are used for fireing samples in the bank. LEDs show whether the sample is playing or not. It also has an option for delaying the updating of the position of the switches: You can choose which samples are going to be stopped and which fired at the next switch which you are performing by the black button (or footswitch) at the right.

The reason in using FMod is that it offers a variety of options of how events should trigger different sounds. You can randomly pick samples from a pool, have multilayered events etc… Also after you have built the project with it, you can run it from a lightweight C-program from command line. I usually don’t need any GUI at the computer side. I have to say that I would welcome a truely open source solution as a computer end. FMod is free for non-commercial use anyways so it is a good option for now. At the moment I am not that proud of the source code of my tiny program so I won’t be releasing it yet, but hopefully soon.