lmdb looks like it might make a wonderful embedded replacement for redis in astrid instruments!

[a moth object](https://moth-object.com/snd/) #nowplaying

I've never had a punch-tape style label maker before. This is super fun. Labels for everything!

Radbound Mens' Three Pieces for Upper Partial Tones is very enjoyable on tape. Ever so slight wow and flutter bubbles nicely onto the surface of the long tones.

Printing is hard.

Hm, I just realized I probably need to finish the piano roll before I can finish 3walks...

Been taking some time again this weekend (while working on the new Audiobulb tape edition!) to keep moving bits of the current (soon-to-be-old) standalone astrid-seq, astrid-dac and astrid-adc into library functions in astrid.c. The first steps of this were setting up wrapp...

Very nice having a working cassette player again. I'm in a virtual jungle of lawnmowers with Coppice's Bypass Ideal tape. #nowplaying

Sam Scranton's new album _Body Pillow_ lives up to its name. Giving it a big hug again this morning. #nowplaying

The temp forecast here for the next 48 hours looks like a straight line. It'll be hovering a few degrees above freezing, day and night, just fluctuating by a degree or two. Odd.

The Rolling Stones doing Sympathy for the Devil always makes me think of slow panning studio shots interspersed with young people holding machine guns. Good job, Godard.

New Helado Negro day!! #nowplaying

I have the piano roll bug again. I spent a while tonight sketching some things with the Helio piano roll editor. It's really nice, very well done. I think I even like it more than the Reason piano roll, my old stomping grounds. Still, it makes a number of (very reasonable...

Spending a few days working on translating the Audiobulb & Friends tape booklets into a mini website.

This is a sketch for a revised standalone version of astrid python scripts. I've renamed the trigger callback to seq and added some new trigger types. The midi trigger is broken into cc and note, and the new serial triggers take a single string / byte blob. I also replaced...

Started thinking again how to do message passing within standalone instrument scripts. Swapping a param struct with an atomic pointer, maybe.

Took some interesting first steps experimenting with opening an astrid instrument message queue in the main thread and writing param updates into shared memory space. Decided to pause on the passive mixer and focus on the relays, motors and solenoids as percussion / activat...

Glued one of the mounts for the bass transducers to my child size violin to try running the first steps with standalone astrid programs through it. This is a test program that has 400 pulsar oscs spread across a pretty small param space. It doesn't sound like much really, but a good first step.

Started thinking about how to break out the control interfaces (message queues, buffer queues, etc) as library features for standalone programs.

Spending some more time with the relay board, I'm suspecting I've got the wrong transistors. They seem like the ones on the datasheet with the same labels, but I found someone who'd got the same parts mislabeled... the proper thing to do would be to test the components and verify they do not behave like the datasheet says they should. The lazy thing to do is make a new board with known components, which is probably what I'll actually do.

Began experimenting with standalone astrid programs that just use libpippi and a wrapper around the jack init code adapted from the dac/adc programs.

Tried some new relays from axman out on a new board and found a short on the existing relay board. Signals coming out of the transistors on the relay board are really weird.

I felt pretty lost on this project this morning. I spent the day trying to pull all the various peices together and see if I could nail down what the rain system actually looks like -- even if it's a smaller / simpler version this time around. The brains will be astrid, bu...

I ported the bells.cpp firmware to a standalone linux program. It uses parts of astrid, but is essentially just a small jack app with an audio callback that looks essentally the same as the daisy firmware. One of the first things I did was go from 2 voices to four clusters of eight voices. It's nice to have more breathing room on the laptop. I wrote "a toolkit for live setups" in the lab journal.

Moved the bells.cpp pulsar firmware to the daisy pod. I did it to be able to work on the train (though I ended up staying home) more easily, but it also made me question the utility of the modular rig, and doing synthesis on micrcontrollers more generally for rain. Plugging...

Started working on getting tests passing for the cython interface on top of the new pulsar ugens. Setting and updating tables needs a bit of work. (See lab notes.)

Got a basic firmware going on the daisy patch and fixed a few more issues with the new pulsar osc. Added a new libpippi pulsar ugen type.

lab notebook lab notebook lab notebook!

We made a family trip to the local surplus store and I found the perfect momentary switches for the passive mixer. I'm no whiz with finding components, I'm still just learning what things are called, but I've had a really difficult time finding suitable switches for the mix...

I updated the stack generator routines in libpippi to support the new pulsar osc style. They just return normal lpbuffer_t buffers now, but also require pointers to two arrays which store the offsets and sizes of each table inside the buffer. Otherwise the interface is simi...

Speaking of off-by-one errors, I found one more in the new pulsar osc implementation! The phase-aligned triangle wavetable (phase-aligned to the sine wavetable) morphs as expected again.

I'm out of town visiting family for the holidays. Staring at the bricks above my parent's fireplace helped me fix some lingering modulo issues with the new libpippi pulsar osc implementation.

The major bug ended up being in preparing the stacks of tables though -- some wrong lengths made for wacky situations, but it's all chugging along again as usual.

I should add some new built-in waveshapes meant for the pulsar osc. Like a triangle shape phase aligned with the zero crossings of the sine-like shapes would be handy for morphing purposes.

Some stack factory functions also make sense. It's easy to break the osc with an off-by-one error, but it should also be pretty easy to verify the data going into the osc is correct (or at least makes sense) with some assertions checking for overflows and inconsistencies.