Keith's Electronics Blog

The Roland Jupiter 6 synthesizer, like most Rolands of the 80s, used low-power static RAM and a battery soldered the to the CPU board to preserve user-defined sounds while the power was off, which worked incredibly well — it was common for the original ba…

I recently bought a Roland Jupiter 6 synthesizer, which debuted in 1983 and is heard in recordings of the era by artists such as Devo, Duran Duran, OMD, and Ray Parker, Jr.

I’ve used my 1986 QX5 MIDI sequencer for a project and it was quite challenging because the pushbuttons were unreliable, taking many button presses to get one to register, as well as sometimes bouncing.

The dark horse in my pulse sound programming demo is my Roland M-OC1 Sound Expansion / Orchestra module, built to provide a library of orchestral sounds for studio work.

The next synthesizer for my pulse sound programming demo is my Behringer Neutron, a semi-modular analog synthesizer original to Behringer.

The chronologically next two synthesizers for my pulse sound programming demo were to be my Unique DBE (Crumar BIT 01 North American rebrand) and Roland Juno-106, but alas, both of them have problems (the Juno had been working for the last two weeks but S…

The first synthesizer for my pulse sound programming demo is my Behringer Odyssey, an analog-circuit-faithful replica of the legendary ARP Odyssey, which was first manufactured in 1972.

Keith, why do you need so many synthesizers?

I’m wanting to play with a medium-resolution LCD screen attached to something that I can program from the Arduino IDE and I happen to have some “AITRIP”-branded ESP-WROOM-32 modules on hand.

A frequently-heard refrain is that ESP32 modules are so inconvenient because with their 1.0″ spacing between header rows, in the standard installation, their footprint covers all but one horizontal row of holes on a breadboard; and kids these days like us…

Back in 2021 I documented the process of installing and selecting support for a particular ESP8266 into the Arduino IDE, in case it would help anyone else and as a reference for the next time I needed to do it myself.

Day 8 part 1 gives us a directed graph of nodes with links to two (hopefully other) nodes and a set of dance moves to perform through the graph; how many steps to get from AAA to ZZZ at the end of a dance pattern?

Part 2 redefines J from jack to joker, making jokers wildcards when determining type of hand but the lowest value when comparing individual cards.