Nibbler1 prototype

The Nibbler was designed to demonstrate basic electronics concepts for a workshop at Electrofringe in Newcastle, Australia in October 2007.

It's a binary pattern sequencer based on common digital and analog chips: CD4516, LM358 and CD40106. A home-made vactrol is used to control the main oscillator.

Initial concept and thanks go to cretin4321 and synthmonger.

Documentation available from
http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net/?page_id=74

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• circuit
• bent
• noise
• electronic
• sequencer
• synthesizer
• dorkbot

[synthmonger]

Cool!

Are you getting the glide effect between notes from a lag processor? If not is it just how you have the vactrol hooked up?

[ArtistEngineer]

Glide effect is an RC delay (low pass filter) between two op-amps.

Circuit goes:

oscillator -> Counter -> opamp -> RC -> opamp -> vactrol -> oscillator

[Intosia]

AWESOME! Really cool sounds :) Are there any schematics for pointers for building this bad boy?

[ArtistEngineer]

The guidebook for this workshop should be up on the Dorkbot Sydney website really soon. I don't maintain this website, so I can't give an exact estimate.

[Intosia]

Ok sweet :) What is the url for that site? Ill keep a look out.

[ArtistEngineer]

YouTube blocks comments with URLs, so remove the spaces.

dorkbot . org / dorkbotsyd /

[orbiter8]

Hi ArtistEngineer,

Is that the OWON PDS5022S scope your using there, and if so how are you finding it please? I'm just getting back into electronics after many years away from it and fancy an oscilloscope this time around, so would be grateful for your opinion on it as the PDS5022S would be one I'm considering?

Thanks & Regards

orb

[orbiter8]

Hi ArtistEngineer,

Is that the OWON PDS5022S scope your using there, and if so how are you finding it please? I'm just getting back into electronics after many years away from it and fancy an oscilloscope this time around, so would be grateful for your opinion on it as the PDS5022S would be one I'm considering?

Thanks & Regards

orb

[carpeteria]

beautiful work - great noises and an interesting control.

[littlescale]

Lol! I meant sound aesthetic! But, yeah, nice.

[ArtistEngineer]

I did consider the 4051, but I just wanted to use a vactrol. I originally used a 4040, but I wanted bidirectional control so I substituted in the 4516.

The oscilloscope is an OWON brand, model PDS6062T. It's cheap and doesn't really go to 60MHz but it's very useful for showing slow moving waveforms. Lower trace is the control voltage, upper trace is the audio output.