rwillett

I can't say I like the pickguard, it looks like that had a load of material left over and just used it up. However the rest of the package looks the sort of guitar that Disaster Area would play. All it needs is a little black button saying "Do not press" on it, oh anda large black spaceship. Rob

Thanks for the information. That sounds about right for me. Any suggestions on makes or models please. Happy to spend £50-£100. Many look identical and possibly are. Are there good ones and bad ones anymore? Or all are pretty good?

Hi I'm looking for a decent bench power supply to test my Arduino pickup winder. I'm a coder, not a hardware engineer (I'm not even sure I'm a coder these days but hey ho). I want to get a bench power supply to test everything out for the arduino and a couple of Nema 17 stepper motors. I've brought this type of dedicated psu's in the past like this (this just shows the type and isn't one I have brought). https://amzn.eu/d/76ekIkm But I keep putting off buying a bench power supply that's a bit more flexible so I can test things work and then get the right dedicated PSU at the end. I don't suspect I'd need anything too big, but I have a number of projects with three stepper motors in mind and they can draw 2A each. So 30v and 6-10 amps seems the right size but beyond that, no idea. I look on Amazon and get very confused so any recommendations welcomed. Thanks Rob

It is truly beautiful...

Now that is a thing of beauty... Just looking at the kids college funds, approx two years, they can always get jobs. Rob

Hawes and the Wensleydale dairy are great. The courtyard don't make cheese and to be honest I don't think they ever will. But what I do know. Nothing.

I like cheese but I wouldn't travel that far. One option we have for the bash could be takeaway pizza from Rind.

Luke You are clearly very close. My daughter works at Rind next to the cheese shop

You might live in Yorkshire and still be nearly three hours away. We're on the border of North Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. My kids go to school in Cumbria and we drive through Lancashire to get there.

Diary vs dairy....

I've got a Mega256 sitting doing nothing. More pins so rewired my code to use that. Stuck a CNC shield on top with some decent drivers. Still working on the menu code. As expected it's 10x the effort of the actual stepper motor code.

Welcome to supply, demand and inflation

I haven't posted in a while, not because I've not done anything but I've been trying to understand the various menu libraries that Arduino systems can use. I spent a lot of time trying to work through the ad-hoc, hand built, unsupported, poorly documented, over the top, over complicated, under specced, version tied and generally not fit for purpose menu libraries before giving up and writing my own. I'm sure there are good ones out there, but trying to find a lightweight library (Arduinos don't have much code space) that actually works, is properly documented and works on my simulator is harder than doing it yourself. So I did it myself. I currently have nine options that need to fit on a 20x4 LCD screen. You can see below that the screen is showing options 1-4. As I am an ex C-developer, everything starts at row 0 which is right and proper. The green and yellow buttons will be end stops that I haven't wired yet. I have two digital inputs left but can't be bothered yet. int noRootMenuItems = 9; SimpleMenu_t rootMenu[9] = { { "0Run " , { INTEGER , { 123 }} } , { "1Number of Loops " , { INTEGER , { 123 }} } , { "2Winder1 Steps " , { INTEGER , { 123 }} } , { "3Winder2 Steps " , { INTEGER , { 123 }} } , { "4Bobbin Width " , { DOUBLE , { 1.23 }} } , { "5Wire Width " , { DOUBLE , { 3.21 }} } , { "6Set Left Edge " , { DOUBLE , { 7.89 }} } , { "7Set Right Edge " , { DOUBLE , { 9.87 }} } , { "8Stepper Direction " , { DIRECTION , { CLOCKWISE }} } , }; The above is the rootMenu setup, the numbers at the start of the char* will go, it's just for me to check. Eventually this struct will be enlarged to handle functions, but I'm struggling with how Arduino compilers declare and pass arrays of structs around. A simple C compiler would let me pass a pointer and thats it, the Arduino compiler is not playing ball and keeps refusing to compile what I think is valid code, a pointer to an array of structs. I may bring out the big hammer shortly and declare a void * to teach it a lesson. I've written compilers so this should be easy, but I must have forgotten something important or the compiler is a lot stricter. Anyway, each line has a type attached to it, INTEGER, DOUBLE and DIRECTION. When you select a line using the 'D' character, it moves to a sub-menu and allows you to edit the value thats passed. I've written the code to edit integers, I'll use that as a basis to input floats/doubles and the last one will be to change the wiring direction, CLOCKWISE or ANTI_CLOCKWISE. The aim is to parameterise everything so adding new features is just a new line in the menu declaration. We'll see how that goes I have all the looping sorted out, keypad entries seem to work, but no idea if they debounce in the real world. I also have printed most of the parts for the winder, including my first simple bobbin. I have most of the winder parts sitting on my desk, but am away skiing from Thurs to Monday so nothing is going to move forward for a few weeks yet. If anybody has any spare broken pickups they are happy to provide, it would be great to see how they are made and understand more about each of them. I don't really want to buy lots of working ones to break apart. Thanks Rob

I'm looking for London, Manchester and Sheffield. People can work remote but need to sometimes be physically in an office. However we are going waaaaaay off topic. If anybody interested DM me. Back to vintage basses. Apologies.

If Andy wants to have a fire sale and drop his prices by around 90% I'm more than happy to help him out by buying a few guitars. They are lovely guitars but outside my limited budget. I have promised myself a 62 'something' for when I retire. Just to be clear, I'm not knocking Andy here. These are stunning guitars in the same way a Ferrari 288 FTO is a stunning car, I can't afford that either. I understand limited supply and large demand. I work with those things every day as I try to recruit people for IT projects. So if there are any SC cleared DevOps (limited supply) here looking for work (large demand), please contact me. Thanks Rob

Well done. More than I managed. Be very interested in your drummer in a box. Makefiles are simple, this is how we used to build everything in Unix. They have a few small idiosyncrasies and the syntax is a teensy bit awkward, but it's easy to read and trivial to debug stuff (for some value of "easy" and "trivial"). Rob

I always liked this method of generating randomness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand and it's successor https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/ Rob

Just did a little digging. I expected the random numbers to be awkward on an Arduino but surprisngly they have a trick up their sleeves. https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/language/functions/random-numbers/random/ void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); // if analog input pin 0 is unconnected, random analog // noise will cause the call to randomSeed() to generate // different seed numbers each time the sketch runs. // randomSeed() will then shuffle the random function. randomSeed(analogRead(0)); } Most PC's don't have GPIO pins so can't do this, so use the suggestion @neepheid has proposed. As there are hardware input pins, they can be read and will generate some sort of randomness. Perhaps not as difficult as I thought. Rob

Thats the intention. It needs some sort of directed randomisation, which does sound a contradiction. I'm slightly nervous about how random things are on an Arduino. For those of you who play with IT, true randomisation is quite difficult. No idea how the randomisation works on this sort of low level kit. Suspect it's not random at all though. Thats futher down the path though. The first priority is getting it working for simple windings and getting the interface done. Rob

I was hoping that silver wire would help me lose weight, regain hair loss, improve my diminishing IQ and make me more attractive to women and not just dogs.

This is where I read about silver vs copper wire. https://mwswire.com/guitarpickup/#:~:text=“Pickups wound with silver wire,very nice and regular coil. Silver wired pickups are not top of my list but the people who supply it think it different. I look forward to trying gold and rhodium wire as well 😊

Thanks I've seen those type of pictures. There seems to be a range from a drill attachment to all sorts of mechanical devices through to computer controlled ones. I was looking at this as I wanted to get different pickups for my 3d printed guitar to see what else it might sound like, and I realised I knew little about pickups, so decided to learn a little. I realised then, that they aren't that difficult to make really. My understanding was that the first Fender ones were literally made by hand as people looped wire around the bobbins. So the people who made them did their best to get it right but clearly each one was randomly made. Perhaps thats what made them interesting. Modern pickups will be very, very similar as they will be computer controlled. The advantage of the Arduino for me is that the actual code that controls how the wire is laid across the bobbin is, checks the sketch, 13 lines long. and one of those lines is a comment Now if I wanted to change the winding to be more random, thats pretty easy, I could put more wires on the top or middle or bottom of the bobbin, I could do a patern where the wire goes across the height of the bobbin in one loop so it's almost diagonally wound. What effect this winding has on the sound is a mystery to me. I am told silver wire has fantastic sweet sounds. If I get this working and I can afford a small reel of silver wire, I may find out. If nothing more, I'll get a better neck pickup for my Telecaster Rob

Let me build it and see. I'm trying to work out the minimal amount of hardware so probably looking at a CNC shield and a couple of DRV8225 stepper drivers. The CNC shield is overkill but it's cheaper and easier than two dedicated single driver boards. The core software is there. There's zero checking, no input whatsoever, it's all hard coded. I'm thinking that I'll just reflash from the Ardunio sketch if I change any parameter. Focus will be getting the stepper motor mounts done, working out the motor drivers and the inevitable changes to the pinouts, putting it all on a small sheet of ply and checking it all lines up. Then I'll print the simplest pickup I can with my own 3d printed bobbin. Dip it in wax and see how it sounds. Might be junk, might be great. Then and only then will I look at anything else