State of Wally, October 14th, 2014

At the moment, Wally consists of these units, from top to bottom:

• PAiA FracRack containting
• PAiA MIDI->CV8
• Blacet Research Dark Star Chaos
• Blank panel
• Noise (White, Pink, Brown, and a knob/jack that puts out a solid voltage)
• VCA (CA3080 based)
• Output (just a volume knob, decoupling cap and an output jack)
• 15v bipolar power supply.
• Juice Goose power strip (master control for Frac, MIDI->CV8 and other power supply)
• 1/4" to Banana Jack interface. Also has a simple CV pedal and foot switch interface.
• A.R.F. VCO - CEM based oscillator with a unique "wave slicer" that allow you to combine top and bottom halves of different waves. (Note, ARF is gone from the web, but here is a link to a guy with a lot of Ric's stuff.
• A.R.F. VCF - CEM based 4 pole low pass filter
• Dual Attack/Release generator with "+/- output" (knob that varies output level from positive to negative) Custom design from Barry Klein's book.
• Blank Panel
• 15v Bipolar Power Supply (much beefier than the little one in the FracRack, originally used to power the MOTM stack.)

I also have a Ring Modulator that is finished and an Octave Divider PCB that's finished and mostly just needs to be wired to its panel. The RingMod was made back when I had plenty of space - spending a whole rack space on three jacks and two knobs seems extravagant now.

With that stack, I can (and have) wire up a simple mono-synth configuration to play around with. I'll try to get some short video together sometime.

The frame I'm using is a 12 unit high "rack mount" frame, which is very cramped. Ideally, I'd have a box with front/back mounts, and move the power supply stuff to the rear.

Internally, my modules mostly follow the "Electronotes" standard - 15v bipoloar power, control voltages in the +/- 10 volt range, and audio in the +/- 5v range, though as audio, it will often have much lower range. I don't have a decent power distribution scheme yet - I just run 3 wire bundles to a trio of terminal blocks. The MOTM scheme was great, but unless I find a cheap alternative, it's too expensive to re-adopt.

One concern is that at the moment, the system is about half and half banana jacks and 1/4" jacks, with a few 1/8" jacks thrown in for good measure. This makes it very trying to connect things together. I'm disenchanted with banana jacks these days, and I like the feel of 1/4", so even though they take up a ton of panel space, I'm considering standardizing on them.

Why so many jacks? Historical reasons. Originally, I was planning to do everything with banana jacks, since they're cheap, reliable, and can "stack". But MOTM was all 1/4", and when I went to that system, I converted a few of my favorite modules (VCF, A/R). The VCO is a prodigious amount of soldering though, so I hadn't gotten around to that one before the Dark Ages struck. Likewise, the PAiA and Blacet stuff was 1/8" only, since it was designed to fit in smaller spaces. The FracRack was mostly put aside when MOTM moved in, though ironically it's back to being very important in the new system.