It's an M4TM EasyEi8ht trigger sequencer whee
This was my very first Eurorack module ever. My very good buddy Nick was willing to do the PCB layout and panel design, and we had a workshop at Knobcon '18 or '19 my lands, has it been that many years!?!?
Real quick before the jump: here's the BUILD GUIDE you might be here hoping to find.
My first drum sequencer was a truly gargantuan flashlight-switch sequencer that served well, but was very large and very fragile. I found The Big Button sequencer from Look Mum No Computer, and built one of those that looked like cake. It was pink, had splatter paint on it, and was so pretty. But there was a "shift" function that never made sense, and it only had six outputs. MOAR OUTPUTS I demanded.....
...so I obsessively taught myself how to code for Arduino, and modified the Big Button code to have eight outputs, and a few other enhancements like, there was the potentiometer that pointed to which channel was "active," and an LED that would light dimly on that channel, and then blink brightly when a trigger was sent out of it. There's a pullup resistor on each pin of an Arduino that'll let you do this... I still use that trick with this sequencer.
WELL, I wanted more buttons to input triggers, so I built a Robeaux Sweet Sixteen (stylized as SWT16 I think) which had sixteen outputs and sixteen buttons, using the magic of shift registers (which I think I understand but have never designed with). The SWT16 was really neat but I hated the one I built because I made the buttons little tiny LEDs glued to tactile switches (uncomfortable to press) and there was menu-diving (such as it was) to get to different functions. And it behaved more like a step sequencer, grid style, and not a tap-style "button-per-channel" sequencer for speed and ease of use.
SO, I used the SWT16 for literally an hour or two, and gave up on it. Didn't live up to what I was expecting. I should have read the user manual before building one. Instantly I started designing a button-per-channel performance-oriented trigger sequencer that would be very quick and easy to use. I learned how to do quick port reads and writes with DMA, I learned about interrupts, I figured out that you totally can use pins D0 and D1 even though those pins are reserved for serial communications... and eventually I had a trigger sequencer that was actually pretty awesome.
I reached out to Nick, who had PCB-designing experience, and he ran with it, developing the two-board sandwich you may have seen, the one with metallic zebra stripes and the old M4TM star logo. Great memories... my own pair of E8s in my tin can modular are the only trigger sequencer I ever use. They're super quick to get working, you've got lots of freedom to jam with the sequence, and I love them very much. No, you can't save patterns. No, you can't delete just one step. I don't even remember how to change the pattern length. BUT, they're easy to use, and pretty powerful, IMO.
I'm redesigning the panel (as seen above) and designing a simplified PCB that'll just be the one layer. Even though you've got to solder an Arduino Nano right where you *also* have to solder mechanical key switches and LEDs. It'll be fine, fine I say. This post here is the landing page for the QR code I'm going to generate in three and a half minutes and slap to the PCB so I can hit ORDER and hopefully get the parts for 30 modules to build at Knobcon :yikes"
WELL, I wanted more buttons to input triggers, so I built a Robeaux Sweet Sixteen (stylized as SWT16 I think) which had sixteen outputs and sixteen buttons, using the magic of shift registers (which I think I understand but have never designed with). The SWT16 was really neat but I hated the one I built because I made the buttons little tiny LEDs glued to tactile switches (uncomfortable to press) and there was menu-diving (such as it was) to get to different functions. And it behaved more like a step sequencer, grid style, and not a tap-style "button-per-channel" sequencer for speed and ease of use.
SO, I used the SWT16 for literally an hour or two, and gave up on it. Didn't live up to what I was expecting. I should have read the user manual before building one. Instantly I started designing a button-per-channel performance-oriented trigger sequencer that would be very quick and easy to use. I learned how to do quick port reads and writes with DMA, I learned about interrupts, I figured out that you totally can use pins D0 and D1 even though those pins are reserved for serial communications... and eventually I had a trigger sequencer that was actually pretty awesome.
I reached out to Nick, who had PCB-designing experience, and he ran with it, developing the two-board sandwich you may have seen, the one with metallic zebra stripes and the old M4TM star logo. Great memories... my own pair of E8s in my tin can modular are the only trigger sequencer I ever use. They're super quick to get working, you've got lots of freedom to jam with the sequence, and I love them very much. No, you can't save patterns. No, you can't delete just one step. I don't even remember how to change the pattern length. BUT, they're easy to use, and pretty powerful, IMO.
I'm redesigning the panel (as seen above) and designing a simplified PCB that'll just be the one layer. Even though you've got to solder an Arduino Nano right where you *also* have to solder mechanical key switches and LEDs. It'll be fine, fine I say. This post here is the landing page for the QR code I'm going to generate in three and a half minutes and slap to the PCB so I can hit ORDER and hopefully get the parts for 30 modules to build at Knobcon :yikes"
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