Electronically they are not that complex (ie theory of operation), troublesome part is wiring - you don't have Chinese sweatshop workers/nearby technical school internes building your prototypes at enthusiast's lab, so it takes ages of mindless work to for example wire all the switches from the keys. Copy and paste of 50 switch debounce doesn't make project complex, it just makes it awful to build (hence Ben didn't use bucket of 555s because of time constraints):)
I don't think the thermal stability requirements are actually that difficult compared to, say, anything involving radio. Not sure how this ended up so drifty.
That. Would be extremely interesting to see what kind of feature set and interface could come up someone who is really digs the old stuff and knows all ins and outs. Would totally help with that, even.
It's practically impossible to build a 555 based keyboard that size without trim pots and just resistors. As you mentioned, the resistors very sensitive to heat, hence need easy access tenability of every key vs 1% variance resistors etc.
No its because of bad circuit design. The adjustment is way too coarse. If one of the pots just drifts by 0.1% the frequency will be off. The adjustment range needs to be much smaller and you need to use low drift components.
the design this is based on is very unpredictable temperature and humidity can change the sound drastically. i bought a shipping box of 555 timers to make one of these keyboards but with full polyphony, thats a project i need to finnish.
Yes, a simple oscillator design like this is going to be temperature-sensitive. You could get away with it with vacuum tubes because they generate their own heat and thus are less sensitive to the ambient temperature, but with solid-state circuitry, just putting your finger on the transistor or IC will warm it up enough to cause it to change frequency!
VWestlife yes the unpredictability of it is its weakness but also its charm the prototype i made of my project were all linked together thermally and coverd in heatconducting epoxy to keep it reasonably thermally stable.
VWestlife yes the unpredictability of it is its weakness but also its charm the prototype i made of my project were all linked together thermally and coverd in heatconducting epoxy to keep it reasonably thermally stable.
There are ways to compensate for this. One way is to use resistors with a very specific change in resistance by temperature. They call them tempco resistors. Design your circuit around these tempcos and you can get a stable analog signal within a given temperature range. Another way is to actually "take charge" of the heating using a heat source and a feedback loop (typically a DAC connected to a CPU). When the DAC tells you you're too cold, you increase the current through the heat source, and when the DAC tells you you're too hot, reduce the current. That way the chip stays at a consistent temperature, regardless of ambient temperature.
What an appropriate name for a keyboard that looks like the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air and sounds like a Gameboy with a cold. I'm all for chiptunes, it's easily 25% of my music library, but this is just a weird bad novelty thing. Still a cool video though!
And for the rest of us, who aren't that neat with a soldering iron and figuring out how to make an analogue synth from scratch... there's the DIY MS-20 among other kits. If only I had some extra cash lying about... ;) www.korg.com/us/products/dj/ms_20kit/
The old analogue synths often had something like a thermistor bonded to the main oscillator chip(or transistor array) to compensate for temperature drift. This is a project that they could have done better with a Raspberry PI/or micro controller or if they had done more research they could have just implemented a single oscillator analogue control voltage and gate system. Glad they tried anyway.
An Arduino would've been perfect as a controller yeah. They also could've gone the Roland Juno/organ route and have an master oscillator with a bunch of divide down circuits to generate the notes.
@@kristoffere9996sorry to reply to such an old comment but the name atari junk keyboard is a play on the atari punk console, which is a very simple and common 555 based noisemaker; this is an atari punk console (or a few dozen) made with a junk keyboard, so,, atari junk keyboard 👯♀️
Not saying Felix isn't a really smart person, but Ben is sorta meant to be the "brains" of the show while Felix is the "brawn". They're both really clever and Felix knows a lot more about programming languages than Ben, but he does the dirty work most of the time.
you guys are 2 of my favorite youtube channels, it was epic to see a crossover between them! like many people, i was hoping to hear that atari keyboard make an actual song, so here it is! thanks 8-bit guy/keys :)
as I recall from bens vid, it uses the 555 timer chip 4 sound, so other waveforms ar not nearly as easy to do as you would think. and if you say he used 556 not 555, their the same thing, but 556 hat 2 555's in it.
Cool project. I did something similar to that about 20 years ago. It only used 1 555 timer for a clock source and 4 chips called "top octive dividers". They were intended for the highest octive and to get the next lower octive divide each note by 2, but I divided the clock source by 2 for each octive. I fed each note through a keyboard from an organ to 44 100k resistors as a mixer. I only needed to adjust one pot to tune the whole kb and got full 44 note polyphonic output..
The sound reminds me of a Stylophone (now there's something you could try out!), terrible, but unique, which is what makes it work, well, 'til it conked out of course... :)
I am planning to create my own keyboard, similar to that one but using an ATtiny, polyphonic etc. If I send it to you when I am ready, would you send it back to me later?
I guess building 12 oscillators and then dividing down with a flip flop would make more sense. You'd still need some sort of VCA per key then... Part count gets out of hand fast, indeed. Although, old transistor organs did something similar.
this is great! I've been a ben heck fan for years, and was featured on one of his episodes. he claimed back then that he's no good at music and wouldn't do a music-related project - I'm glad he finally did!
this reminds me a lot of a synth i built in university. the more pots you use, the worse it gets hahaha. i built a very simple 2 oscillator polyphonic synth, wanted to do 2 octaves but even cheap parts are expensive. the polyphony ended up working alright (but adding waves meant you would have to lower amplitude somehow), and i even ended up having it generate some cool polyrhythms as a result of the waves adding the way they did. the synth was glued onto a plank of wood and i think most of the cables are now missing. but watching this was a cool trip down memory lane
I have thought about it for some time but I got to ask. It would be great to see how you go about composing. I mean, what are your routine go to stuff (key, chord progression, melody relationship to chords)? you have distinct style/ sound to your melodies.
Not really, he's just saying as a practical keyboard it's junk as you nead more polyphony and it needs to stay in tune and all that. But he's also saying that as a proof of concept its a really good idea that he enjoyed playing around with. Ben says its not as good as it could be due to his self imposed time limit and design choices to make it a quicker build. He does a llt of projects and cant afford yto get bogged down.
Eh, not really. It was a quick build, it is just a concept. I'm sure Ben and Felix just wanted to see if they actually could build a keyboard before they started building something more advanced and bigger.
It was a bit blunt perhaps, but to be honest, it was kind of a ridiculous design on Ben's part. Especially if they were on a time crunch, it seems like they actually made it way more complicated than it really needed to be, and made it worse as a result.
Daniel G That I can agree on. There were some things that they could've done better just as fast, but I still think it's an interesting concept with no microchips or anything!
Mmm, jury's out still. I like 8bit guy tons but Ben really knows his stuff so sounded a bit "meh" when in fact with time constraints it was very well executed - and 8bit guy probably couldnt do it himself in that timeframe.
yeah. Why is everyone being so harsh to Ben & Felix. It's such an awesome project, and it works quite well. It could've even been shipping that caused it to fail. It doesn't even have a sound chip and it still sounded good. I doubt 90%+ of everyone watching this video can actually comprehend how to build a keyboard of their own like Ben & Felix did. So much disrespect in the comments. It's like telling an artist their art is shit when it's their first time trying out watercolour; instead of the usual pencil drawings. Ben isn't technically a professional in the field of music, but he is at pretty much everything else to do with electronics. People are being way too harsh
That may all be true but this is intended to be a musical instrument, it serves a single purpose and it should be judged by its performance. If someone enginered a midi guitar but didnt bother with proper fretboard then it would be useless defeating the purpose of engineering it. As a viewer I see this video as showcasing a prototype which is nonfunctional.
A company in Italy called farfisa was building all electronic organs, without the use of any digital circuitry, or even integrated circuits, half a century ago. These devices used initially germanium transistors, which were supplied by Mullard of the UK, and eventually switched to modern silicon transistors. Schematics are readily found on the internet, and they are excellent examples of electronics as an art form. Even today, surviving units are prized because of what is called the farfisa sound.
The Ben Heck Show stuff is allways interesting and they have a lot of knowledge- BUT I allways think they put not enough thought in their concepts to make a good result- and than they ALLWAYS rush things an make stuff kind of useless in the end....
mario64remix nothing except one of the original designers who came up with the schematics thought it sounded vaguely like a 2600 after they built it and the name stuck. Search "Atari punk console" on Wikipedia if you want more info
COUGH COUGH!!! Original designers my ass....Forrest Mims designed this circuits and published it in a series of cool little electronics schematics book, published in 1980 to look like someones hand drawn notes. At some point some people hit on this circuit and started selling kits of it to make money out of someone else's design, give it a stupid name, and inspire a million numbskulls to make horrendous sounds with this god awful design. I include myself in that. The best thing I ever did was throw away all my 555 chips, although someone did actually manage to make the 555 chip sing, the Thomas Henry 555 VCO is an osciallator worth playing, it;s a much more complicated build than this however (and way more expensive) but if they could build a keyboard that had 4 of those, which could be either across the 4 octaves or put into some unison mode, they would build a serious contender for a worthy synth. Akai released something like that which famously sounded awful at NAMM as it never kept tune at all, all the demo videos are beyond funny, I don't know if they ever released that synth, but surely these guys could build something better than it.
Ben Heck - over complicated and over engineered solutions to problems that do not exist. He's done some great things, but builds like this just seem pointless.
This was a great video but crap keyboard worthy of the dumpster. Time restraints or not Ben Heck but if you're going to build something, DO IT RIGHT!!!!!!.
555 chips rely on capacitor discharge time to generate a pulse and if flat ceramic caps are used then the timing will be greatly affected by the ambient temperature.
Where does Atari come in place? Did I miss something? Btw, that is actually an immature and next to useless device. Rather a waste of time, honestly. In respect for the effort involved I hesitate becoming explicit. If you do something, do it right.
I cant remember the details but the keyboard is essentially using the same method to create sound that the old Atari used. This was more a prototype to see if it could be done, a lot of effort but they learnt things and created something interesting.
Waste of time for you, maybe, but not for the people who made it, nor the people who watched the episodes and learnt a lot about simple electronics in the process. The nerve of some people...
ComandanteJ Please don't get me wrong, I honestly and totally respect the effort and the skills coz I could not achieve anything even close to working status. But this doesn't render the device useful. And srsly no disrespect at all to the creators. But I couldn't say "Great Job!". Could you?
"I honestly and totally respect the effort and the skills" Then act like it, instead of being a pretentious jerk. This isn't something that's supposed to have a utilitarian purpose. It's for fun and also serves as a teaching tool for basic electronics.
in 2001 I built my own VCO based on some ancient sound chip and added a keyboard and the tuning system I came up with is similar to this lol... it actually kinda worked. I was going to build a VCF and VCA but I never got around to it... alot of fun.
When just using circuitry without any sort of computronics, you can expect this sort of inaccuracy. That said, this was really neat, and pretty damn sweet.
The pots are logarithmic meaning that at the lower end the ohm values are spread out and at the upper end there are close together. Replace them with linear pots and you'll be able to tune the notes at the upper end.
Trent Reznor could probably appreciate a synth like this, he uses a Swarmatron quite frequently in his music, it doesn't have much electronics, just a spider circuit board with relays and knobs.