There’s been a string of slightly cryptic photos of work in progress in the Pictures thread and now they’ve turned into a thing:
Foxfield Instruments is a little imprint of mine making music instruments and tools. I launched with a set of DIY 1U tiles:
From left to right: a dual gate-to-trigger (left input normalised to right); a 1U clock source with three ‘ranges’ that does 0.1hz up to 500hz; a ‘utility LFO’ that spits out tri/square bipolar waves; an attenuverter normalised to 5V. All surface-mount, all Pulp/Erthenvar size (sorry, Intellijel 1U folks), and all tile-tail power connectors. (I also have a tile-tail adaptor board).
If you’re afraid of SMD, you shouldn’t be: these are all designed for human assembly with soldering irons and tweezers and use big 1206 parts. I made a film about making the LFO to demonstrate that you can build these even with shaky hands:
The kits are available now from Thonk in the UK.
I’ll be at Brighton Modular Meet on 2 July in the UK with these in a case, along with a variety of new prototypes to show. There are two 3U modules in the works - one, a useful set of utilities designed as a first surface-mount kit; the other, a kind of cousin to Monome’s Walk - and 3/4 new 1U prototypes. My 1U stuff tends to try to do a tiny bit more than some of what’s available, all whilst fitting into 6HP.
This is a slow journey: two years ago, I’d never designed a circuit board. I’ve learned from the experience of others, friends, people on forums like this, and the open source community; special shouts to Olivier Gillet (whose Shruthi-1 was the beginning of my dive into SDIY) and Tom Whitwell (whose open-source files and libraries have been invaluable). The designs were mainly done in January, but turning them into useful kits has taken time and lots of learning smiles. Foxfield is a part/spare-time endeavour - it fits around my other work and is ‘bursty’ in the way it takes attention - but it’s definitely meant to continue. Hence why I think of it more as an ‘imprint’ or ‘label’ than an industry, at the moment.
Very small beginnings, then, but: onwards.
(I hope it’s OK to share this here; people have been following along and enthusiastic)
