In the meantime I've decided to expand my little sequencer. As I said in the last post I breadboarded a little 4 stepper to play with. Here's the whole setup as it was looking:
So I've now done a stripboard layout based on the Same schematic, added some resistors for the LEDs and an 8 position rotary switch to select the number of steps by connecting the reset pin to one of the the outputs, which gives me this:
Apologies for the sideways-ness. As you can see I've left plenty of room on the board, as I'm planning to add another chip and upgrade to 16 steps.
I was a bit short on potentiometers so I just wired up the first four as a tester, and the whole thing seemed to be working perfectly, apart from the fact that I couldn't make a four step sequence! 3 steps worked fine, and when i turned the switch to 5 that worked fine, but for some reason 4 gave me the whole ten steps! not even eight! the full TEN! I triple checked all the connections and decided maybe I'd static damaged the 4017 chip, so I swapped it out for another one but must have had a wire touching the underside of the board or something because then something went bang. After much chin scratching and another 4017 replacement I realised it had been the 555! swapped that out and the whole thing is working fine now. Just need to buy a few more potentiometers and find a box to put it in and we're rockin'!
It may seem like I've neglected the VCO a bit to work on this, but it doesn't matter how nice my sine wave is if I don't have any way to make music with it. having this sequencer set up will help me get more of an idea of how stuff will sound as I progress through the rest of the project.
Also, I just realised that by giving it an external clock input hooked to an audio output from my computer I can send a pulse to it on every beat (or 1/2, or 1/4, etc) so that the sequencer will be in time with a midi track.
HOW BLOODY COOL IS THAT!
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