Which part of the beatstep pro style relay serquencer are you looking forward to? there are actually quite a lot of things in it, including memory for the notes to be playedd in. keyboard matrix's, digital to analog converters etc. all to be done on relays!
Relay life is usually rated for the contact life at rated currents, you're only passing signals, so not really an issue The coils (as you rightly said) are more like speakers, as long as you don't greatly exceed the coil voltage, those relays should last years.
Came here to say exactly this, he's probably pushing hundreds of times less current than they were designed for. At that point the mechanical failure rate would be higher, and that'll last years easily
Passing small signals is often worse, than passing currents close to 1/10th of rated current. But it looks like that he is using contacts to control onother relays, which is probably the best case.
Can You please feature Your mum in next episode. It must be many interested to see the woman that gave birth to the maniac building all those wonderful contraptions!
Really amazing work! 3 things kill relays. To maximize life address all 3 and they will live for a very very long time. 1) Contact current. This is easy for many of your applications because you are mostly only conducting signals with low current. Relays that must close on high inrush (incandescent lamps or large capacitors like those found on power supply inputs) will slowly erode the contacts. Since you are driving lamps, there are a couple things you could do to improve the lifespan of your relay contacts that are responsible for the lamps. A) Change to LEDs (boring). B) Find the right sized resistor to just barely make the filiment glow then put it across the relay contacts. While your bulbs will never truely be "off" they will be preheated which will significantly reduce in rush current and preserve the relay contacts. Use big (high-power rated) resistors cuz they will get HOT. Inductive loads also cause arcing on contact OPENING and require diodes or snubbers to prevent this arcing. Make sure you have a backwards diode on each of your relay coils to arrest the coil current when the relay is de-energized. Clever trick, put a 10-ohm in series with the diode. This will cause the relay to drop out more quickly. Maybe only a few ms, but you might be able to cycle noticably faster. Optimal resistance should be 10-50% less than the coil resistance. Make sure your diodes have the cathode (stripe side) facing (+) side of relay coil. 2) Coil failure. Easy stuff like don't over-current your coils is obvious. But the parallel diode/snubber not only saves the contacts of upstream driving relays, it also reduces voltage stress on the wire insulation. This will prolong the life of the coil. You may also notice less electrical noise in your audio signals. Small value cap (
Watching and listening to this thing in action is giving me heavy flashbacks to 1970s Dr. Who. I could see John Pertwee encountering this in the TARDIS.
This is 100% the coolest sequencer I've ever seen. That crossfade function is like the heart of what modular synthesis is for. The idea of being able to plug anything into there and add and subtract them from each other feels like a black hole full of possibilities to get lost in. My first thought is how cool it would be to put 2 sequencers with different sequence lengths in each one. I definitely need to make a sequencer with that function.
After a lot of brainstorming, I think this can be done with 2 4016s and a 4017. In super simple terms a 4016 is 4 non-mechanical relays. In theory, you should be able to set the 2 4016s and 4017 up as an 8-step sequential switch with each 4016 input receiving the center pin of each pot. All outputs of the 4016s would then be chained together. Probably with diodes. I'll update with my findings.
6:03 I feel like most arcade cabinets back in the glory days gave us something close to this with the strobes and the rackachatatatata etc. I love thinking about shit like Defender/Rampage/Centipede/Robotron/others because of the sounds they'd fill those bigass arcade rooms with so this was unexpectedly nostalgic
At first I thought: "Nice, a sequencer - only that it's implemented using electromechanical circuitry." But when you added the contact mic output then it became an entirely new beast. This is now an electromechanical instrument. That's really unique :D. 8:21 : Hearing that relay lose its shit really cracks me up ;D. I love listening to hardware that's pushed to its physical limitations. Seriously, though: That's an electromechanical oscillator. Has anyone done a module like that before? That's incredible! I've never even thought of the idea of adding non-electronic (or not entirely electronic anyway) modules to a modular synth. This opens up so many possibilities :D. Actually, thinking about it someone's GOT to make a Floppytron module now :D. And a printertron. A modular synth consisting of mostly voltage-controlled electromechanical sound sources. That would be INSANE :D.
I must watch the entire video before making suggestions, you've usually thought of everything and beyond anyway! I'd love to visit the Museum and have a photo taken with the Megadrone :)
have you tried feeding 2 audio signals in the voltage inputs of the sequencer? i guess that it would become like a sequenced audio crossfader with some interesting distortion!!
I got those vibes too, it was like listening to a pinball machine, if they played music instead of just beeping. Also I do remember the old, galaga machine in San Francisco, at the arcade in game building in pier 39. The music, played with the relay synth, reminded me of that machine, is why I mentioned it.
@@jameshamaker9321 that's really cool! I love classic arcade games and ask the mechanical sounds. So stimmy! I might have to build a pinball machine (solenoid style) 🤔🤔
Those relays you were beating the crap out of on the mega duck reminded me of a device we use at work to do very basic EMI testing that is basically a 24VDC relay with a mains plug attached which just stuffs 240VAC across the coil and makes the relay oscillate very aggressively. Makes a hell of a racket and always sounds like it's going to explode, but that thing's been going for about 30 years!
Haha that's fun. I've seen some videos on electromechanical buzzers which work much the same way (such as "the Dixie buzzer") - and you get different sounds at DC and AC, or even depending on the voltage IIRC. A lot of those sounds immediately stood out to me as having been used extensively in Thunderbirds and other Anderson productions.
Hm, that motorbike sound around 10:00 , you wanna see if maybe you can get 4 relays, or even 4 sets of relays, going in a pattern a 4-cylinder engine might go at. Or indeed some other number of cylinders. It'd sort of be like a distributor, except you're not gonna put it in a car. But it might sound like a weird engine, be an interesting sound effect. Especially if you then twoke* it. (* twoke, the past participle of "to tweak". Obviously.)
I definitely thought it sounded like a motorbike or vintage tiny car engine at points too. (Though that's really two ways of saying the same thing!) Especially when the cabinet was closed, muffling it slightly just like an engine bay would do.
You are out doing yourself on this project! I really like the idea of boiling everything down to relays - can't wait to see beatstep pro style!!! And the music is relay, relay good tooooooo!!!!!! :)
Now another idea for something weird... Make a thing that has a continuous loop of audio tape. Perhaps one record/erase head. And then playback heads for each step of a sequencer. I suspect that would be funky as heck in a low-fi analog way. I wonder if it'd be able to make some glitch/stutter noise effects?
Hey Sam, I've been watching this guy's videos from Brussels for the last few weeks. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-n3lvFEsf1O0.html Up pops today's, and look whose T-shirt he's wearing ! :-D :-D
Haha, welcome to life as a Telecoms technician a few decades ago… step by step and crossbar telephone exchanges were bloody noisy places! Each type of switchgear had its particular cadences, each rack a symphony of electromechanical engineering brilliance.
Thumbs up. No comment on horrific torture of mechanical relays - they're just stupid relays, ... right? ... and that's why we use relay sockets ... um ... you did use relay sockets ....
Steam-Punk? Please. We got Electro-Punk right here! Never before have I had such an urge to learn what this guy does and make my own electronic music-making gear. Damn. I think I'm to embark on a new hobby.
Superb! Really want to hear a relay based percussion box, like the guiro, but with a massive relay (like from the display cabinet) for bass drum. Different sizes of relay, mounted on different materials, some with rattles and chains hanging off, coins on the contacts? Electromechanical percussion - you'll need a quieter sequencer! Love this fella, very Delia Derbyshire
This is totally the most amasing way to recreate the 595 chip and the 555 chip. You could have wired those two with like the D-type register 74, 173 for latching. Yet, you did the incredible and did all this with realays. Inpecable talent for sure!!!
using the step sequencer as a shift-register with multiple steps summing to give the output is at the heart of scott stites' "klee" sequencer. chaotic, unless you tame it with overall range control & force-to-scale (if you're making tunes!) (shameless self-promotion) soundcloud.com/duncandisorderly-1/klee-celeste-jam
You are Brilliant !! I am a musician/Actor/Magician "Old school style" , so you can imagine how much I Love the Frankenstein mix between Analog , Mechanical , and digital. Looks like I will have to binge on all your past videos' this weekend.
im also working on a project with relays and getting grief about it, especially for my application and the lifespan of a relay... some people... sheesh
There's a guy in Brazil who made an instrument kinda like that, his name is Tony da Gatorra, "gatorra" is the instrument he invented. Here's a review of the gatorra (this reviewer is not Tony, the inventor): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-LJtwtmbRJ40.html
Your imagination & enthusiasm is boundless - outside the box? More like outside the planet; but honestly, such fun too. Cannot wait to visit the museum and tinker.
does this mechanical de bouncing have a effect on the sound versus integrated circuits? those sparks (witch you can prevent by adding a 100nf or so capacitor)...the delay of the separation?
Just a thought. Relays create a nasty reverse EMF as the magnetic field instantly collapses when the switch opens. This is a high voltage and in the opposite direction to the applied voltage that energized the relay. This is actually how car ignition coils work. To prevent this annoying voltage from damaging other things we pop in a diode to short out the voltage and the current passes through the coil windings and heats them up instead. B U T surely this also slows down the opening of the switch as the magnetic field hangs around marginally longer than it could. Why not instead collect all this reverse EMF that the sequencer is creating and have a big spark gap on top going zrrrt zrrt along with the sequence. I reckon a ladder of diodes some capacitors and a car ignition coil and this this could go cosmic?
