Plainsong Metronome
The Plainsong Metronome came about partly as an opportunity to implement more complex PCB design principles that I had been studying, and partly as a full product development idea, as I asked myself:
“Why has no one made an aesthetically-pleasing, nice sounding digital stereo metronome?”
Even the best offerings from audio-specialists Boss and Korg looked and sounded a bit, well, naff at best. So I flung together a few ideas and came up with this fun little project, complete with a classic 70s synth-inspired sheet aluminium and wooden enclosure.
This design is now open-source under the CERN-OHL-S licence. Please feel free to use and contribute to this project. All Altium projects for both PCB revisions, test firmware, and mechanical enclosure designs can be found at the Github repo below:
https://github.com/stuart-soutra/Plainsong-Metronome
Velouria LED Controller
The Velouria began as an idea to develop a simple product that could control and power a small amount of NeoPixel LEDs. The idea was that I could use this to develop a range of LED products that required the level of customisation that NeoPixels offer (ambient light fixtures, for example). By handling all of the control, power and battery management on as small a PCB as possible, the system could be implemented in small consumer lighting products.
The Velouria has a battery management circuit – utilising the Analog Devices LTC4065 charger, and the Diodes Inc AP9101CK for protection. Control comes from a compact ATTiny412 MCU, that can be programmed using the header solder pads. I decided to include limited IO, only including 1 digital input and a digital output for the NeoPixel string. My reason for this limited control it that the products I was looking to include the Velouria on would only require very limited user interaction (for example, utilising a single capacitive touch sensor to change a NeoPixel effect).
Please feel free to use this design. All of the relevant documentation, including schematic diagrams, BoM, and gerbers can be found at the Github link below.
https://github.com/stuart-soutra/Velouria-LED-Controller
Empire Biscuit VCO – Thomas Henry Clone
This project started as an idea to build a full Eurorack Modular Synthesiser. The first building block that I wanted to make was a VCO. I found multiple recommendations on DIY synth forums pointing me towards Thomas Henry’s design for an analogue VCO (a good article on the design is linked here). I decided to make my own hardware implementation of this VCO, focussing on low-noise PCB design, but remaining faithful to the original.
The VCO has is a single-voice with Hard-Sync, FM and PWM inputs, and sine, triangle, ramp and square wave outputs.
Full credit to Thomas Henry for the original schematic design. Please feel free to use my PCB design. All of the relevant documentation, including schematic diagrams, BoM, and gerbers can be found at the Github link below
Electronics Design, Services and Fun 