I’m active in the Intellijel forum again, and that means it’s only a matter of time before I came up with another complicated-to-explain module that I need to have made with love by robots in Canada. This idea is still pretty fresh in my head, so don’t be surprised if it makes no sense at all. I will add in a panel mock-up later. Edit: No, no I will not. The concept I came up with has been already done, much more elegantly expressed by the Xaoc Drezno
The idea I had was a digital sampler that can make a sequence from a single sampled voltage. It samples an analogue in, converts that to a signed n-bit float, and then can rotate through the bits to output new voltages. Here’s an example: in binary, the number 11 is 001011
(1+2+8). If we were to rotate that number to the right by one bit, we would get 100101
(1+4+32), resulting in 37. If we were to rotate the number 11 to the left, instead, we would get 010110
(2+4+16) resulting in 22.
So that’s bit rotation. Now let’s talk about signed floats. Digital numbers are often represented as decimals, where 01
is 1, 0.1
is 1/2. Signed floats would take the first bit of the number to check if it was positive or negative (thus, 0.01
would be .25, but 1.01
would be -.25).
Let’s talk about the n-bit thing I said earlier next. The number 11 could be represented as 1011
, but you’ll notice that in my example I wrote 001011
. This is similar to saying 011 instead of 11. The module I am imagining would sample the voltage as a signed 64-bit decimal float, but you could select how many bits are output. This would cause the output voltages to become more and more quantized, or bitcrushed if the module featured a track and hold instead of just a sample and hold. In the most extreme case, the float would be a 1-bit integer. This could either be a gate out if the module was processing unsigned data (on/off), or a square wave (positive or negative 5 volts).
Ok. Are any of you still with me? Let’s get onto the actual module design now.
First off, it would require an input jack to sample the voltage. It would require a knob or encoder to select how many bits to use (1 to 64). I’d love to have a polarity switch, setting the module to either +/- 5v or 0-10v. It would also be nice to have an attenuv— you know what, let’s just put a triplatt on the output. Saves words. Two trigger/gate inputs, either for a clock/reset or a shift left/shift right. And of course some LEDs to visualize the whole thing.
Ok. I’m done rambling now. Does any of this make sense?