Starbucks of Berlin: Lower Friedrichstrasse

Today I went to Starbucks to think about transistors. To do that, I biked due west on Urbanstrasse, and then turned north to cross the river. This road goes by some of my favorite postmodern buildings, such as the SPD Haus, center of social democratic party politics in Berlin. Also, it hosts my son's Kendo tournaments, I am told.

Approaching the old wall, and crossing it, we are reminded of the past history of surveillance, and the relationship with Eastern Bloc. The Embassy of the Czech Republic is a wonderful futuristic building from the seventies DDR. Unfortunately, it is gated, and I could not get in to snap some photos in dark walkways beneath it, which apparently featured some Soviet ceramic murals.

Oh well, moving on, and looping around to my destination, a spacious Starbucks on Friedrichstrasse. It is nearing some elections in Germany, and apparently the far right party AfD owns the block around this Starbucks!

Now I am thinking about what it means to be far right, or what it means to be social democrat. Since I am writing today about transistors, I am confronted with the bipolar relationship between PNP and NPN. Perhaps the PNP is the dark lord of right wing politics, because it is so over bearing from its populist core? And the NPN is social because they match and talk to each other, with social distancing intact inside the chip?

Let's dive deeper. Entering the 'bucks, I am greeted with Jazz house music, and order a large mug of filter coffee. I want to write a little about some recent research and practical experience with amplifier chips and their positive flavored substrate. 

Did you know that about half the silicon boules in the world are doped positive (with boron) and the other half (with arsenic) negative? We only use the positive ones for chipmaking, whilst negative wafers go almost exclusively to solar panels. I often think about the relationship between my discrete PNP versus NPN transistors, and they come from the two different flavors, but that is actually a small slice of the market besides chipmaking. 

I gazed at the indoor plants, sipped from my huge mug and checked, and the split is about half and half between chips and solar. I know that this system is optimized for holes and electron carriers in operation, but what if some foundry made a process that used negative boules? That is, the emitters of pnp transistors would have the strongest doping, and the npn transistors would be inferior but have access to the body diode for a vertical emitter follower. The body would be connected to positive, and this rail would be thought of more and more as ground, in a negative supply system. Like the old BOSS pedals.

The transistor structures in a regular silicon chip vary widely for different purposes: gain, current and voltage handling, and speed. In the earliest days, pioneers like Bob Widlar had to basically only use NPN transistors, because they were limited by process expenses. The collectors are the first light arsenical plateaus formed, then a heavier boron inset for the bases, and finally a rich arsenic in a tight core forms the emitters. This forms the best beta transistors, isolated from the wafer by reverse diode. 

The process for isolated npn integrated circuits is thus only three steps: n, p, and n. However, to form a pnp transistor, you first have to isolate an area from the body, which is already doped p. So a whole process step is wasted just to isolate the collectors. Furthermore, the rich arsenic isn't used and beta suffers. Silicon designers had to be really tricky, creating different ring structures for emitter and collector with the one boron step available. Since the base is the whole perimeter area, basically beta is upside down and out of control. They are more lateral than vertical and the results were always imprecise.

Later designers transcended the pnp limitations by adding extra processes and using p-channel field effect devices. However, it is important to note the one powerful form of PNP that was always available: a vertical emitter follower with the body as collector. For example, I sipped some coffee and then I started sketching on graph paper, how an LM3900 Norton amplifier would be doped. You can see my results here. It starts on the left with the NPN mirror and gain transistor. Their emitters stare at us like candy in a current bun. But then the fourth transistor is this powerful, PNP that only has two layers: the third layer is the wafer itself, so it is directly modulating current from the grounded chip!

 

In this chip there are also some PNP structures which are formed in the compromised process I mentioned above, with meta-structures and pseudo field effects. They are for micro-current references however, and one of them is basically a boostrapped diode, so they are not in the strict beta matching regime that the input transistors need to hold to. The output of this chip comes from the emitter of the body-collector PNP, coupled to a normal NPN emitter follower.  

This highly effective power relationship pervades most of the opamp output structures you can see, except for Bob Widlars very first effort, the 702 from 1964. One thinks that Bob was in the trickiest mood when he designed this; maybe he had written off PNP as frivolities, maybe he was inspired by older tube designs such as the Philbrick. In any case, he only used NPN transistors, but on his very next design, he immediately gave in and employed the body follower, his first and most powerful PNP placement.

My source is "IC Op-Amps Through the Ages," by Thomas H. Lee. You can see how I circled the PNP follower on the output stage of the OP-07, in Starbucks' house brew. 

Recently I had some experience which really brought the nature of this body follower home. I was using the TDA2822, low power bridge amplifier for a long time, in solar sounders and my line of Tocante solar touch instruments. Realizing the nature of the ground current loop in all amplifiers helped explain a big problem that I fixed by magic.

The ground on these devices was previously connected through a tenuous trace that wound under the input capacitors. Sure it had enough power available, but did it have the rf magic? Apparently, as time goes on, amplifiers like the TDA2822 use smaller, more efficient processes, making their input structure more sensitive and susceptible to magical interference. The size of the PNP body follower probably stayed the same, but it sinks current directly from the wafer, and that can easily start effecting the sensitive current sources that serve as bias and compensating. Basically, the sweetest Tocantes, the Zenert filtered noise and the Phashi sine waves, sounded like fart.

Actually, in the older version, the NJM2073, by Japan National Radio, you can see that the sink output was not a PNP follower, like Bob's original design. This may be intentional, to avoid having a body follower. In any case, they always sounded better, even in poorly grounded situations. The version input, however, always remained a PNP follower with grounded (body) collector. You can see it in both the NJM2073 and the TDA2822. The ground loop would be inevitable once it came to a body follower on the output. 

One day I cut some traces on the fart machines by mistake, including ground. Reconsidering my ground layout fixed everything, in an audio application that would normally not bother with rf magic. Now I'm drinking coffee and gazing at bustling Berlin, and realizing how tied together these PNP transistors are, and they can really mess up the politics of the chip.

 

If you look at my rough sketch of the TDA2822 silicon doping, you can see a sensitive PNP input transistor, and a powerful PNP output transistor all sharing the same boronic piece of silicon ohmically on their collectors. That is why we need to ground analog well. In fact, grounding is more important than bypassing the positive supply!

Next on Starbucks of Berlin: A Butterworth filter in East Side Mall 

DDR Sci-Fi: Sinobara

Sinobara

Thomas K. Reich, born 1951 in Reichenbach, Saxony, was an educated Meteorologist and Geologist. He wrote mostly scientific non-fiction. Sinobara is his only Sci-Fi work.  

In this future, the earth has received transmissions from the distant Eridanus civilization, which lies outside the reach of current space travel. Instead of going there directly, the earth must build a multi-generational chain of outpost worlds, such as Sinobara, where a colony is presently being built.

Sinobara has no complex animals or even insects, just plants and bichordates: a primitive and harmless crawling animal. A supernova had caused the extinction of all sophisticated life more than a million years ago. It has life, but not much diversity; it is lonely in a creepy way.

The outpost on Sinobara can survive with the mineral reserves it has found, but they need coal to be truly independent. A mission had already been sent into the wilderness of forests, but disappeared suddenly. 

The next mission employed an armored vehicle, like a camper with lasers for clearing the way. On this mission, two petrologists for preparing the test bores, a chemist for analyzing the minerals, a biologist, and the leader. 

The team quickly does find a limited amount of coal reserves, and the success ameliorates the colony’s energy deadline, but the team continues. A recurring theme is the friction between Ronson the chemist and Ingstorm the biologist, who have survived a gruesome incident together, wherein a beloved comrade, Mirjam, died, and which they blame each other for. Ingstorm has his famous astrobiological theory, which states that although life is infinitely diverse, plants remain immobile and animals mobile: 

"Plants are open Systems, animals are closed … there can be no intermediate form."

Ronson criticizes the theory as geocentric, and indeed the planet Sinobara threatens to undermine the theory, when it reveals a yet unknown denizen of the wild forest: the mobilophyten. These life forms have plant cells and growth characteristics, but are mobile like animals, and have a sensory ability to seek out the nitrogen afforded by bichordate colonies. The pose little threat to the humans, but may unwittingly have caused dangers, from their modification of the local geology to build terraced breeding ponds which spontaneously burst and sundered the previous mission. 

Ingstroms fundamental theory of astrobiology is under threat by the half-animal half-plant intermediate forms, and he defends his theory arrogantly, giving up in the end. The crew must think creatively to understand how the mobilophytes operate, to avoid endangering themselves and the lifeforms. 

The story is told from a group perspective, and instead of a violent monster or alien cliche, the challenges are more subtle, and a spooky depth comes from the perplexity of trying to understand the truly incomprehensible alien. No revelation or communication comes in the end, but the mission returns to plan the first coal mines of many at the edge of the wilderness.

Glossary 

• Protonenwerfer: the multipurpose weapon and tool of choice on board the Herkules, a titanic land exploration tank. 
• Mobilophyten: Plants that have mobility on planet Sinobara
• Zwischenformen: A form of life with characteristics in between two kingdoms.
• Reizempfindlich: Sensitive to stimulation. The problem is how does a plant communicate and react to stimulation without a central nervous system.
• Analogtheorie: A scientific process of relating two systems with seemingly similar properties, such as Sinobara's mobilophyten with Earth's plants. However, the limits of this theory are tested. 
• Kombination: A typical Soviet future has the crew dressed in one-piece uniform overalls. 
• Vernunftgabe: Beings capable of reasoning. It is hard to detect whether the mobilophyten can reason, or even communicate. However, they do modify the environment in a way that suggests goals, creating wetland habitat for bichordates as nutrients, and raised limestone structures for reproduction. In the end, it is dubious that they are reasoning beings with goals, but rather their life processes themselves induce survival. What Richard Dawkins means when he postulates that genes have a survival instinct. Also, like the scallops in St. Brieuc Bay, part of a network with agency assigned to non-reasoning actors.
• Geozentrismus: The idea that on an alien planet, scientists try to understand the phenomena by referencing earthly processes, that may be a false assumption.

Cover by Burckhard Labowski and Regine Schulz

Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence @ Radio Shack, Part XIII

The president wants to switch the internet off.

The button wants to be pushed. It has a force field of power of trembling hands that dare approach it, for fear of interrupting all online commerce instantly.

Monassi is an amber, assymetrical button, with an unpleasantly yet tacky side to the rear, a void of unmixed epoxy resin created by the artist, late at night, after a chariot ride, who all too hastily improvised a button out of too hastily stirred materials. Monassi seemls like a popup alien technology from a cheap movie. Little air bubbles are suspended in the improperly mixed material, along with a pubic hair.

"Might as well add a seashell and snow to make a duckpond landscape within," snorted Blanc, who was currently inside monkletto. "I've casted lead, i can steam bend wood, but i've never spent so long on a single resin button. This'd better be good."

"Monklert, it will be good." Monklert is the name of the persona when Monkletto talks to himself late at night, to the Blanc inside himself.

Monassi wants to be pushed, and wants to feel like an ancient relic, like grandma's face, when finally touched. There's no internet in grandma's house, but memories of freshly washed, old, bedsheets.

Monassi gives you your smell memory back. Like a band of scrolling material, impregnated with different touch sensations: gravel, duck feathers. At such a concert, the audience is invited to approach the band at the edge of the stage, and regain your touch memories. The scrolling touch band is the thin shoreline between the ocean of senses and the land of drinkers.

Monassi is another rocker on this stage, wanting to actuate, yet there is a powerful field surrounding it, the hesitancy, or angst, of other actors to actually trigger Monassi. 

Monkletto stepped outside. The clear sun warmed him, and the cafe chatted with itself behind its yarns. Monassi caught some sun and sparkled like honey.

"Maybe the gooey back part will cure in time, in the sunlight?" Monkletto wondered to himself. But it didn't ever really cure, remaining gooey to accumulate a crust of pigeon debris, as Monkletto and Blanc tossed it back and forth outside the cafe. 

After speaking for a bit with a grunge dude about last nights chariot rides, Blanc felt down on Monassi, bursting with the trembling of masked emotion, "This button isn't any better than a piece of gum embedded in the sidewalk of a tiny Ohio town."

"Monassi will be great, though, by forming an emotional field by her imperfect electronic materials."

Under the fearless hand of the president, Monassi as button, gooey in the back, creates emotional tension for all internetted Americans, some of them authentic, some not.

The idea of the band of touch sensations, I owe to my dad. Late one night, he was driving me alone in a car, through the mountains of Pennsylvania. He recounted this idea, as one personally beholden to him, that he had imagined as a child. In it, he imagines a musical show occurring on the stage, and at the front lip of the stage, a band of canvas is scrolling that has different materials embedded, so the audience can feel certain sensations on their fingers, cued to the music.

Bonus Poem

Blanc poked in the papyrus.

Blanc attended the conference of detritus painters.

Monkletto is the pharoah, naturally narcissistic.

Blanc teaches authenticity to gilded, but deaf, ears.

Good Blanc is ancient Blanc. 

Bad Blanc is modern. Their identities smudge,

Blanc and Monkletto together in a ghillie suit.

Blanc posing in ghillie suit, face unseen, in front of Hanumann's barn.

Ages later, the basement rooms are painted black, 

the new youth program is about astronomy. 

posters of planets and galaxies cover the walls. 

space rock is played there, after a prayer, 

micro doses of psychedelic mushrooms are distributed.

Mister Norton, Poetics and Principles, Chapter 4, The Tierhorn

Ted was high in the castle tower that he rented, daydreaming of ivy.

Bill was in the tower too, leaning out and watching a herd of 

    deer approaching the village clearing. 

When they were at the edge he shot an arrow that killed the deer

    and the people who cheered all came below except for Ted, 

    who appeared high atop the castle tower:

• In anakin leathers,

• Pale and clammy

• Lips stained by the wine of truth

• Ostensibly To celebrate the feast of the beast, waving an arrow. 

His face suddenly puckered and aiming at bill he said,

We are the same person therefore if 

    we both hunt deer one will disappear.

Then he shot, and hit a crow which the 

    village ate quietly along the deer.

 

What follows are the usages of Norton amplifiers in the new instrument by Ciat-Lonbarde, called Cafeteria. It is a complete rehaul and recreation of the Cocoquantus, divided into three modules: Digital Cafe, Quantum Experiment, and (special edition) Tier Horn.

The preamp of the cafe uses one Norton amplifier (Application Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments), with two PNP differential pairs, one for digital feedback and the other an input preamp. Thus, the most direct path between DAC and ADC is driven with the simplest silicon. Each differential pair is driven by a current mirror, serviced by an arp-serge apparatus.

There are five such oscillators in the Quantum Experiment, which is depicted at the bottom as platters of bric-a-brac shapes in a loop of flitty voltage samplers. The Quantum is thus abstracted in this schematic. At the top, one Norton (Application Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments) acts as VCA to modulate the frequency of the main oscillator, composed of two Nortons: integrator and hysterizer. It gets a miniscule biasing current from the fourth Norton in the package. The VCA is controlled by a simple arp apparatus, and the main oscillator, by an arp-serge apparatus.

The tierhorn is a special edition deerhorn with a true heterodyning theremin. In the center are the two radio coils, feeding a four quadrant current multiplier, integrated by Mr Norton (Application Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments). Continuing down, the sine wave is converted to pulses for a tachometer, like on the datasheet. Flip flops make the pulses into undertones for the dubstep filter. But first the voltage from the tachometer goes through two boundary circuits with variable decay. The boundary signals and tachometer are subtracted to create an error signal for the stereo enveloped theremin outputs. The boundary signals also feed a wobble oscillator (top right), which bounces between those boundaries, then modulating the state variable filter (top left, note that it only requires two Nortons). 12 Nortons total in the fleet.

What is Tarsh

 

Tarsh is an adaptation of Shtar.

Now there are at least four things:

-A Shtar with sculpted body

-Shtar with chunky body

-Tarsh with sculpted body

-Tarsh with chunky body

Whilst the Shtar had 17tet scale,

which is regarded as whimsical, DIY, punk 

all in all radical version of the sublime neutralities 

The Tarsh adopts a just intoned one.

based on a scale by Khyam Allami, but modified,

i had to switch some razios to 19, a high prime,

to fit it into eight bit music.

 View of the actual ratios in the layout, which are printed on the circuit board.

Whilst the shtar circuitboard was black, tarsh is green.

What follows is code for the scale, from shbobo:

 

<@ oc 
 [[48 48] [57 54] [60 55] [63 56] [57 48] [81 66] [81 64] 
 [64 48] [72 51] [80 55] [72 48] 
 [95 60] [90 55] [81 48] [96 54] [96 51] [64 33] 
 [96 48] [114 54] [120 55] [126 56] [114 48] [108 44] [81 32] 
 [88 33] [96 34] [96 33] [120 40] 
 [114 36] [108 33] [108 32] [96 27] [64 17] [128 33]]> 
 
 
 
 
 <@ cars 
 <# [o] 
 <? o <tank <" <" o>> <cars <: o>>> o>> 
> <@ cadrs 
 <# [o] 
 
 <? o <tank <" <: <" o>>> <cadrs <: o>>> o>> 
> 
 
 
 {(right (fog (dust 11) 
 (smoke 4 4) (smoke 10 100) (ladder (finger) <cars oc>) 
 (ladder (finger) <cadrs oc>) 
) 
 (brass (horn 27 11)) (brassb (hornb 24 11)) (slew (steel) 2 2 (saw 32 48)) 
 
 
 
) 
 (srate 40)};the ratios are brought kindof into the middle (mean) of 128

Mister Norton, Poetics and Principles, Chapter 3, The Ringler Clicker

 April 2003:

A Musik like whirring propeller blades was heard, 

and the plush curtain lifted from Ted’s plant.

It was withered.

Ted said, this April we had a freezing event, 

which bonsai of the sumac, 

crippling and making micro leaves. 

But here is the symphony in the wound, 

Ted said, brushing the foliage.

You-- 

            bald trombonists gaze into the curly mysteries at the event.

 

Here is a new circuit using only BT:NORTONs. It is for making two clicks, such as in the military clicker for seeking landscape features at night, using your ears. Thus each click must have a symphony in a millisecond, according to Jan St. Werner. An hysterical oscillator is purposed for pulse trains and envelopes, with varying slopes and frequencies.


 

Two oscillators and two swoops, which is almost identical to oscillator but it has a pulse input and it is saturated to stay low until triggered. The capacitors of the two oscillators and two swoops are switched to heavier ones by a guest star, the 4066, to make musical mode out of click mode. The two oscillators enter a ringmod at the north pole, and the two swoops enter a ringmod at the south pole, and these and their inversions become the modulations for the oscillators. Rungler inspired ringler, in that they process and feedback to the modulations. Ringlers, however, are a gentler more analog and symphonic sound. In this cursive schematic, hollow twiddles are npn and dotted twiddles are pnp. The curly cue of each 3900 is verted input, because it pulls back and towards the main thornal output. Both inputs are current to ground, which inspires the whole foliage of dotted curlicue eyes (Application Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments).

Bt had a speaker rotated back into a concrete bunker, that way he can access the volume controls and input, which are on the back, and he can test pulses echoing in a concrete chamber

The rungler was a data misinterpretation of a modem. The ringler is a simpler analog confuser fed back.

Mister Norton, Poetics and Principles, Chapter 2, My Other Faces

The ferret comes at night and chews my wires.

I'm a technician, it’s a devil,

So i make ultrasound techno.

creating tools to modulate country animals.

 

My backwoods friend JIM still has a tube of me in his shed, covered in poison ivy. He still makes simple class A circuits with a yellowed 70s manual about me. They are a little smaller than BILLs class B circuits. He uses me for swine management.

BILL still wears plastic shirts from the 70s. But BILL has moved on from his old manual and now builds modular synths. His special sauce is to use transistors and a secret chip from the 70s. It is the 90s.

BILL also uses me for swine management, in an art gallery in the city. See, his circuit has control inputs, and he creates a web of bubblegum colored cords around a wooden pod, for his art. The name of his art is GWYNNDAMUFFIN.

Country sounds are twangy. Twangy is a sound that easily echoes off the hills, and vibrates over the corn with amateur (movable, flexible tuning, dissonance) techniques. Fast banjo also has a sort of rascal nature, like the shenanigans of bunnies and creek hops.






Faces are important in electronics. The old Mister Norton, ridgid, with a plastic shirt, focusing on class A circuits, which are simple resistor things and bric-a-brac capacitors. The new Mister Norton has transistors in his dreamy eyes. At the very end of the datasheet (Application Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments), is a hint that you can hack a differential pair onto the two inputs of the Norton, thus expanding it to all the sorts of arp and serge mechanisms. Class AB is a pragmatic mix of simple resistors and the newer transistor installations.

Mister Norton, Poetics and Principles, Chapter 1: My Face

Garden gnomes were once eerie, 

because they held still, 

bleached ancient things looked at, 

But privately,

they bump and scrape the night,

thought bill as he looked out at his yard. 

I want a modern gnome:

one who carts his miniature wheelbarrow around cheerily, 

now, while I stare at it in my sunny yard.

The solar gnome eclipses the butterfly.

But when I sleep, 

he holds stillness, 

a bleached stone in the moonlight.

There are two Mister Nortons, Bill and ted, and they form the foundation of BT theory. Upstairs at the New Zork art gallery, video art was displayed. In the basement, Bill created a synthesizer on a piece of canvas, roughly 2 m long and half meter high, and filled with frames wooden frames, which formed the basis for hand etched circuit boards. He found oscillator schematics in the data sheet for Mr norton (Applcation Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments). He had some in his Bronx basement, the head flooded many times and was filled with rat poop. At the same time as the exhibition, Ted was working, it was July 2nd 1993. Ted was working on repairing barbed wire and because of the damage to the barbed wire fence, he decided to create ultrasound circuits to control swine. He went to the shed where he had a tube of Mr Norton chips and a yellowed tobacco stained data sheet.
 

The first schematic is a picture of Mister Norton. It is a face. The face arises often in a circular circuit schematic. There's a triangle for the nose and curly cue for the eye and other riffles for the lips. Just the basic symbols of the analog world: triangles, swirls and curlicues.

Performance Notes for Solar Sounders on the Canal, May 2022

Near Patch Point on Forsterstr in Kreuzberg, Berlin, flows a canal slowly, with a peaceful bank of flowery bushes. A French cafe is always bustling with expats. This sandy shore receives sunlight most reliably, compared with the urban canyon of old houses that Patch Point sits in. There the birds echo accross the buildings, many high twitters, and in the evening a songful blackbird who claims the street trees by its everchanging, multi-resonant patterns. 

To perform an afternoon of solar sounders, the sandy canal bank was targeted, and thus thereafter, a demonstration of vegan fishing would be folded into the performance. The opportunity would not be missed, to combine my two favorite sports of center-pin reel casting, with experimental off-grid electronic sound art. 

To prepare for this piece, I had finished a new case design that combines two of my favorite aspects of woodworking: computer scripting for efficient and tight-fitting parts in fine hardwood, and scrapcrafting with glue... The scraps are mini lumber from the edges of old prints (previously cut pieces of hardwood). Often this way I can save many beautiful patterns that would otherwise be burnt.

The case features a parabolic bulge that houses the panel and mount, and two angled chubs for speakers. The panel supplies nine volts and comes in a few different sizes, roughly corresponding to frequency energy for soprano and bass voices. After gluing the structure together, the sides are crafted with scraps simply glued on, then everything is sanded like its from Pier 1. Yes, this is how I chase my ideal 90s import store.

The ground mount is a new addition to the solar sounders, and this piece thus concerns itself with ground. A steel pipe, purchased at Bauhaus, screws in firmly to an aluminum flange on the underside of each box, after it is hammered into the ground. The flange and thus whole assemby is connected to ground of the solar circuit. Thus we can create or even play with the ground connection between each instrument. 

 

Traditional banana plugs were mounted on each box, and connected in to the androgynous pulse-brain within its circuit. We listened to each without any patched points, while I poured canal water gently into the sand at the base of each one. There was a simple experiment to be done, asking if we could hear a modulation with this wet makeshift ground for it all. THe banana cords were connected between each instruments, and what was heard as un-syncronised birdsong, became synchronous.

While the experiment was running, I threaded a european canal bobber onto a long rod with light line, and affixed it with banding. Three lead-free splitshot (ROhS) anchored the bobber upright from beneath, and they tapered in size properly from largest at the top to tiny at the bottom. As I said, this is vegan fishing so just a wisp of line hung beneath the tiniest splitshot. I could assure protection of my audience as I started with only underhand casts but moved to overhand once I got my courage up.

The weather was a perfect mix of everything chaotic. It had rained earlier but the sand was still quite dry. There was strong blasts of sun followed by deep depths of cloud, which is the best most natural solar dynamic, as far as musical expression is concerned. As a bonus, the wind came from many directions, gusting up the canal in ripples, and even coming from behind me to get a rare cast with the wind. 

As the instruments clucked gently and resonant in the shade and bloomed in the sun, I bided my time watching the bobber slowly drift down the canal. The analogy was about ground and the canal. Current flows in the channel, but it can only be measured if there is a still ground under it all. A bobbermontage will also demonstrate a gradient if weighting is properly spaced, as current is fastest on the surface and slowest on the bottom. I joked that I was sensing bites but no one in the audience got the joke.

The audience was there to experience electronic music at patch point, and drink beer later in the evening. This is the time of Superbooth, and many visitors had just arrived from out of town. 

The sand is a compelling medium for performance because of the electro-shamanism of ceremonially imbibing its earth. Vegan fishing was a great way to bide time non-violently.

GRBL ESP32 CNC CASE

 

This is the Berlin (wood) workshop. We currently have three 6040s, one 9040, and we are building a collection of 3040s upstairs for little work. Managing all these CNC machines at once, in a loud and dusty environment, required some rethinking.
 

The traditional way to run CNCs is with a desktop computer assigned to each one, that sit nexts to it and you go to it every time you need to change a job. There exist, however, wonderful open source operators for arduino nano (GRBL) and ESP32 (GRBL ESP32). These make the woodshop into an internet of cutting things!

 

So, in GRBL ESP32, each machine is on the local network, and has a name that you type (such as tony.local) into a web browser. There are seven signals that then go to the CNC machine through a printer cable. We are currently working on making musical sense out of these square waves, but this report concerns itself only with making CNC machines work the best.

Each ESP32 fits perfectly inside a Busch-Jaeger "Ocean" Steckdose, which was already being used for the electrical wiring in the workshop. When I got one for myself I was rekindled on home improvement case hacks. It even has a rubbery cable relief that perfectly fits one usb cord and one printer cable, which is split up and soldered directly to the board. Extract all the electrical plug furnishings, and the protective flap on the front leaves a perfect little space for the SD card, also wired directly to the board.

Eventually, I realized something about the dusty, noisy environment. These are little computers, being left in the cold woodshop, with tons of electrical noise emanating from the spindles. Our biggest CNC was crashing a lot, and I made a plan to separate its grounds with opto-isolators. Now the ESP32 has its own private ground, which it does not share with the ground of the CNC driver. You can see in the following picture, floating above a layer of kapton tape, seven licorice jelly beans which are the optoisolators for each channel:

 

 

Inside an Ocean Steckdose with ESP32, seven licorice jellybeans are there to optoisolate grounds.

 

 

how to prep the opto-isolator spider ticks.

Another brashless view inside an Ocean Steckdose.

Schematic of the opto-isolator circuit, after Oskar Schlemmer.
 

 

Ocean Steckdose with GRBL ESP32, and in front, an Aquastar Steckdose with GRBL on a nano, which requires the nintendo game-style controller for movement and program control. This option is also solid, especially at 9600 baud.

 

Another view inside the Ocean Steckdose with ESP32. You can see the cathode resistors (around 150 ohm) for each optoisolator. Red button is hold, and there's a resume button on the opposite side.

 

Here is a handy chart that should work with any parallel (printer cable) driver on any machine bigger than a 3040.:

signal name	esp32 pin	parallel cable pin	nano pin
xstep	12	2	2
xdir	14	3	5
ystep	26	4	3
ydir	15	5	6
zstep	27	6	4
zdir	33	7	7
spindle PWM	2	1	11

Note, the SD card is wired according to the standard hacker instructions, where you solder directly to a microSD holder.

Under the 3040 size, CNCs don't usually offer a printer cable connection. They are usually only connected by USB, but usually they have their own GRBL driver and you can always hack into the TX and RX pins to use a nintendo-style (also called "random-style" in the 3018 manual) controller.

Shbobo Fret

 

Trying to get this cast in either brass or nickel silver.

Meanwhile I found a company who says they can machine them from brass.

Will make shtars much nicer to make.

 

Lecture on Bauhaus vs Hornbach

 On September 19, 2021, as part of the SUPERBOOTH non-activities, I delivered a lecture at Patch Point on the topic of Bauhaus versus Hornbach. Here is a description of the lecture:

I will procure a laser pointer to narrate twenty slides about the history of the bauhaus movement and its relationship to hornbach. My words will be mangled/backworded by cocoquantus that we sell at patch point, a solid group of interesting people.

I did not procure a laser pointer, and I did not pursue a slideshow with projector, so the program became the usual, a narrated benchmark test procedure of cocoquantus. In retrospect, I realize that I realized quite a few things about the oranging sector, and what it means to be an orange store, of home materials or synths. And since this is an orange blog, it seems important to document here. So here's the google slides, what could have happened was awesome:

Troutnalysis 1: Petrogenesis

My name is Pete, professor of fictional electronics, and for your computer music lesson, shall not subject your piece to strict analysis, but rather employ a meta-sport diversion called "troutnalysis."

Troutnalysis is part of my "interrogajoke" series: interrogating topics in a post- fashion by employing jokes. Troutnalysis is a three part course: Petrogenesis, on the relationship between sport and petroleum; Action, on the subconscious need for mystique; and a response to Georgina Borne's ethnography of IRCAM.

 Petrogenesis

Author of essay:  Petroleum Bottle 
Primary Duties: Mesh/messmaking, Facilitating objets-stereos.
Secondary Duties: fishing, driving petroleum vehicles

The ribbon of highway sometimes runs up with the stream of salmon (fishing in the pavement). My trout-shaped car trolls the pavement, sometimes I note an old man on a boat. All arts make someone suffer. Fly fishing is an art, which literally makes the trout suffer. Who suffers from your art?

My name is Petroleum Bottle, because that's how a girl named Danielle made fun of me in third grade. I cried that night. My older brother spoke of my girlfriend, it felt like making fun, and I cried some more. I sobbed at my dad that I didn't want a girlfriend. How wrong would I be.

Like a primordial dream of treasure in a cave, the Soviet theory of abiotic petrogenesis. Mineral energy springs forth underground, from the rock itself, not from crushed up plant material. Driving a petroleum bottle up the mountain is communing with these powerful rocks. The mountain creeks have a rainbow sheen, a natural slick that irradiate a collective hallucination in fly fisherman, as they naturally flow with a small amount of petroleum.

I have to admit that I am somewhat competitive when it comes to fly fishing, but that is because I entrust you or part of my fold, or become part, and take my comments as curmudgeonly generalizations on human nature.

The economy of fishing derives from petroleum industry: you must drive to a mountain lake to do it. It also deals with the technical and toxic metals: lead is used to bring baits to the bottom fish. Lead is bio-active, changing and impeding an animal chemically. Fly fishing is somewhat resistant to the toxic metal, preferring no weight at all, some brass and copper. The most conscientious fisherman uses tungsten, it is heaviest and bio-neutral.

like the website "gink and gasoline" which means petroleum based fish lure ointment plus the automobile locomotion to home in on a fish in the mountains; they won't know what hit them! Petroleum Bottle did!
 
What is the lead fish? What fish is most "at home" with this heavy metal? To know, we must think of all fish and what alchemical symbol belongs with each; the sharks of the deep, and the lighter fatty fish of the shores that taste so good when smoked.

Onion Sandwich Man

Ernest Hemingway wrote a modern fly-fishing story early in the career; it was obviously a crucial metaphor to him and potent with analogy to war and industry. Fly-fishing is, in fact, ancient, as we will detail later in the chapter on Aelian. Hemingway lived at a time when modern plastics and composite materials revolutionized fly-fishing, yet it tied to the ancient technique of fooling a fish and eating it; there still is violence, perhaps more because of the efficient way that plastic line casts.

Fishing, in "The Great Two Hearted River" is a metaphor for the war technologies of World War I. That war was the most efficient to be known thus far, an exponential growth from previous ones due to technology. Fly-fishing, too, became more exponentially more efficient. Yet, the protagonist eats only an onion sandwich for most of the book: he is post-haunted in the ruins of war.  For this reason, we call him the Onion Sandwich Man. Let us perform a psychoanalysis of this "onion-sandwich-man" (OSM).

He is a deep individual, not just simply surviving in the wild. He may be in a wild place, but he is wilder inside and this makes him a complicated individual. He is not fly-fishing the wilderness, but a burning town. It's not just survival, it's chaos magic. There's a non-rhythmn with his actions and how he catches fish: the first one he released so gently, the second one was big and he lost it. The third he kept. Finally he gutted them. Only later in the book is tension released when he slaughters the fish.

He eats a simple, onion sandwich. This act of improvisation marks him as magical, an alchemist of sulfury into savory. The onion sandwich itself is a red flag of chaos, the sulfur smell added to his breath, makes him rub up against others disjointedly, the sulfur smell is a symbol of noise and tumultuous change. The only scent allowed on one's flies should be garlic, rubbed on your hand and your sandwich.

The town is burning and he's eating an onion sandwich: that is a flag of chaos magic.  That is, the art of contingency, leveraging weather (a sudden freshet or riffling breeze) or circumstance: burning town, only an onion to be found. It is said that the gods do not mark fishing as time wasted (even when skunked), because the fisher is engaging in the chaos computer (programmed by god), learning patience, and awareness to sudden opportunities.

Tying flies is a natural technology, that has been mixed with synthetic technologies: plastics research, nail polish, and electronics parts such as wire and Mylar bag. After the world wars, surplus materials such as copper wire became widespread in flies. My uncle was in a radio shack on Guam, did not see much action but many water buffalo, and repaired electronics in the morning. It was boring, but using his hands, he created a nice little shack. The same in his guest bedroom, using ostrich herls and rooster capes, he prepared to meet nature again with his new nylon lines. Time flies with these materials is learning how to be at peace with them.

The onion sandwich man is surplus personality from war; he is trying to finding out how to be at peace.  He's at odds with the water, at best adapting to it. there he encountered stange animals in mud ventures. He never told me any war stories, just about the muddy electronics shack, and the yellowstone cutthroat.

What would it mean to be Ernest Hemingway in a world of global weirding? You still have your short sniped sentences, and the sharks are still there, but your sport has chaotic storyline. The good fish are gone and the weird fish remain. In his twenties, Hemingway sought a storyline in Spain, drinking and bullfighting with his hipster friends. His fishing trip there was completely sullied by polluted waters, but in his fictional trip (The Sun Also Rises), the trout were fat, eager and ripe.

Classic fly-fishing is considered dry, or on the surface, wet, or just beneath the surface. However, some forms have evolved, based on solid foundations in entomology, to go deep beneath the surface: imitating the chironomid. This midge, or tiny fly, starts its life on the very bottom of the lake as a worm, quickly evolving into a mysterious vertical larva in the water column. It is deep, and still, yet it has a mysterious hand gesture: it is named for this gesture. It part of the art of flyfishing to transform one's own hand gestures into an imitation of this creature of the deep, tethered by a long and slender line.

My first experience with chioronomids confirms that esoteric is chaos magic. fly fishing is a quest for the esoteric and chironimids are the most esoteric. At Lava Lake, dinner and breakfast was trout, we didn't bring eggs. Bright green midges in its tummny. Powerbait and lead go hand-in-hand, fly fisherman  are against the use of lead in the lake. Midges eat lead.

LED Chironomid

Chaos Magic

Go fishing in a polluted body of water. Salvage electronic ruins. Derange a wild cat by taking it to a bagel dumpster in the suburbs. Go to a place that you know has bad luck, multiple times to accumulate it, so you can have good luck somewhere else. At the waterfalls there are old transformers and turbines.

If you are from Oregon then your grandpa represents the Oregon trail. The Oregon trail still exists, in the thousands making their way to the global worming refuge. My truck has shelves and pots and pans and niches for onions. It looks like a green wagon trail camper. Because my dad is dead and my grandpa is too, i have no Oregon trail, i have to be both dad and grandpa if i move to this land.

His kids can live in the city and he can realize his ideal of theOoregon man. But I don't have a dad to be the Oregon man so how do I respond?  This is the same question as how does a man retain a mystique on the water? Well I will not buy a camper and for a boat I will have a kayak, try to keep it minimal. I wear dirty pants. My grandpa tore up old shirts to use as twine. My grandpa squeezed the lead sinkers on with his back teeth.

Holidays should be at random times in the year, to minimize exposure to campers and to reveal secret migrations. Always look for the onion, when i met a camping family,  the grandpa of a family showed me a bunch of trout poaching in an aluminum rollup and it smelled like onions. He used random spices, but only a little bit, because they forgot salt, and it was great! Then they found some salt and unrolled the foil to put salt in it and put some butter in. Grandpa said it was better with less foil because then you can smell the fismoke. the presence of onions is confimed in the chaos magic story. Onions are the key ingredient that caramelize and release chmicals into the trout and change its form along with the butter. Another great ingredient is orange peppers.

the coastal range fish eat orang, inspired by the orange bellies on the newts in orange slit on the throat. the cascade range eat green, inspired by different shades of moss green and algae, from the deep sediments at the bottom of lava lake. the two colors orange and green are those of the mountain "dew"

Oil

There are thjree kinds of oil. The oil used to transport the sportnsman to the wilderness spot. The oil that is polluting his home rivers in the city: pcbs. And finally the oil in the fish's brain that is used for its memories. It is along its spine too; body memory. These three oils have a relationship to each other. The fish oil is how it goes from the coastal city the river into the wilderness passing through the port city. The fishemans oil also moves him but in a dumb way. The pollution oil is a taint on the fish's brain, but its dielectric constant has a mysterious and unknown effect on thoughts. The pollution oil is from electronics and i am polluting again with the transistor ant.

There are different kinds of trout, you can taste them by eating them. You can taste it when you eat them. Hatchery pond blue-green pond. trail north worst, they taste like urine. The best is a wild small trout from a deep lake, or a rocky river. You could taste it wehn you eat it. There are types of flesh incarnate that are fooled by the smell of rotting dough, and there are ofther flashes that are fooled by girl patterns, recognition etched in omega oil. It is the recognition oil that the fly fisherman seeks. I seek to know if trout recognize electronic components.

Trout and Salmon both have this salmonid oil, which has evolved from their need to journey up mountain rivers to keep their babies safe. They remember the way home by the smell of the water, landmarks, colors. They also peel back the onion skin to what they ate as babies: little aquatic insects and other tiny tasty things. It is a sequence of ghost-images they remember as they take this journey of life, and of death, for that is their fate once depositing their young. Is the pink ghost flesh that we are after eating, for it is a psychedelic.

The forms of the flash incarnate. The tree pond brown turd sucker. Deep sea predator and noble king salmon, black gum king salmon, spirito-politically owned by the gillnetters. And habiter of mottled places, where sudden dances the entomologist. The football linebacker, the steeler, chrome worker of back hills Pennsylvania and Ohio. golden trout is mythical and small, should you eat it or worship it?

The wild man of the mountains is limited by the barrenness of his soil, that says , so he turns to hunting cougars and coyote, which in turn feed the meat soul and makes him more of a hunter. When the cowboys encountered these people they also left behind a sort of pale worm band who only prefers to eat the oily fish of the little mountain streams. There were men also had typewriteers which they typed the first modern novels on, in sandals there.

A receipt from Ollie Damon's, where we bought shad darts and strange discount bass jellies. We also bought line and rooster tails, and asked the old reddening man on how to wrap a sardine around the lure. My revelation of the day was that this man did not know and think about how to flare an LED in the depths of the river, and he knew about the piezoelectric force, that may provide enough current to dimply flickering the LED. He knew it needed something striking it to discharge it as he said.

I eat salmon so I can put the memory oil in my own brain and subsume it. The dam is like a hard electronic obstacle, which the salmon oil seeps around. The salmon encode a memory in oil, starting in their deepest brain as a baby, eating little things: crustaceans in the river, and the smells of their adolescence: the smell of the city sewers. Trout are likewise, they do drip down the stream eating things.

All these things encode a memory that accumulates, which they peel back again in their later years, stripping the oil off the memory oil in their brain, and reverting in the end of their life when they trophy, to eating tiny things. This is the concept of patterns, which are hard like symbols, but encoded in oil, like the concept of the PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyl) analog delay drum. This rotating cylinder was employed in some poisonous electronic music studios to encode sound directly in the swirling fluid, as dielectric charge. Then the sounds were replayed through the speakers again, emanating from the encoded oils.

The salmonid encodes its journey in oil, from the inside out, then travels back within; back in time as Rudolph Steiner told us to recount our day to ourselves, backwards, every night. If you rotate it fast enough, though, it stops swirling and becomes froth, and mixes up the memory. This sort of globally-weirded-fish can swim in more than one direction on the river.

The yellow fungus eats their memory away. Remember you can record audio onto a rotating head of poison oil. The Salmonidae also record memory on two layers of oil in their body.

This is a technique I learned with Stefan Tcherepnin, of blowing marijuana smoke into a synthesizer before playing it. Now I do the same with flies, to make a creative undulation happen in their computer music.

Blanc's question starts with the rumor that trout like the smell of a spray lubricant, WD-40. What if they like other petroleum flavors, what if they like industrial smells such as electronics? Can salmon smell the PCBs in the Willamette river? Can they learn to be attracted to this most synthetic smell? Can they smell heavy metals?

Like the onion-sandwich-man, who takes great care to not damage the protective layer of slime on his first trout, I am damaged by waterways full of PCBs and leaden sculpin; that is the damage that makes me angry at the clean fish and want to kill them employing a piece of electronics. Like the bird who is snared in a fly-line, my children are angry about their aborted world.

Mountain Dew

I get my tungsten beads in metallic coffee, because I can, and that marks them as the special metal of the deepest chironomid, or Pennylvania midge. Also, a good morning camping on Lake T_____ will involve an espresso in my aluminum grenade.

Major Carey traveled by railroad to the interior of Canada, where the great lakes dwell, and pitched his tent by the grandest body of water. He then made coffee and sat down at his camp table, praying to himself; this is the combination of my dreams in the wars, of sitting down and creating something in nature. What he created was the Carey Special, essentially a truly green Aelian, using a pheasant's rump for the partridge hackle. It's olive body and dun undulator evoke the older days before bleach and synthetic dyes.

Jeff Carey employs a nice gaming joystick and also some really effective LED strobe lighting to deliver chaotic and gestural noise music to his listeners' ears. When I saw him there where no colors, just the action of flickering white light, a hooked, enigmatic penusius grasped by computer musician, creating undulating sheathes of sandstorm sounds. These are three most important points of the LED fly: action, mystery, and again, action. The first action is synthetic, the flickering of mylar strands; the second action is natural, sheathes of feathers slipping in the stream. Mystery is essential to the stone-age fly, because there is always the question of "what is the hook?" You use ACTION to convince the trout that it is simply the tail of a juicy and easy prey, as Carey uses noise and flickering lights to convince you his joystick is a penusius.

Do you mountain dew or do the mountain?
Jeff Carey is sponsered by the Dew Tour. The colors contrast with the Mountain Lake times past nostalgic colors of General Carey. In Japan, Dutour is a nice cafe with muted tones and good boutique coffee. However, in America, it is an outdoor stadium of blood, with bright green attractants and nutritious hooked hooking fluids. The river is green not from pcbs, from nature.

General Carey was the first Dew Tour. The military has dumped about six thousand pounds of trout into Henry Hagg Lake every month of the spring. Dough suckers, bombs of dough suckers. In contrast, the paisley Oregon Dep't of Fish and Wildlife releases pretty things into Lost Lake deep in the woods.

Science project, stomach pump 1:" 1 beautiful chironomid, estimated to be at size3 18 2x long nymph hookwith gray metallic, i.e. mylar chip bag with 1tan floss, black wing case like peacock herl, black haed, P.t. trutt. and two tinty white gills . Stocmach pump two: similar wormy like forms and patterns. stomcah pump three: nothing. stomach pump 4: yellow and gree n Mountain Dew colored powerbait with mylar flash holographic flashes in it.

a[pprocahes scientific through use off the stomach pump/
lost lake, mar5ch 30 2017

Fluorescent green and yellow powerbait flecked with irridescent specks of mylar. If I were an EPA official, I might even confuse it with capacitor ingredients. Like powerbait these trout are branded with energy discourse. Mountain Dew volt. Powerbait is measured in wattage, like md volt, these trout are branded... don't get me wrong i like hanging out with men of the river, stuyrgeon men with wabndering eyes.

These are my babies, in the cement tank in Clackamas. My babies, my tank: I manage it, I come here on my days off to feed them dough balls. I liaison to light artists to display bright green and orange colors through aa milky perspex cube in the bottom of each tank, for the entertainment of my babies. They like light, they like sounds. When you control the breeding tanks at the top of the stream, you own the fishes' minds, their core memories. I've taken away the natural programming of muyted insects in natural tiny mountain streams, and replaced it with bright hypercolor flashes of mountain dew cans. in their deepest memory.

The tank in clak is for streelhead.

The disco beach is a synthetic natural phenomenon of the trout industry. Take a lacunarian location such as trillium lake in Oregon on the slopes of Mount Hood. The lake itself is created from a marsh, impounded by earth. Then the dough ballers at ODFW installed trout that respond to synthetic mylar sparkles in the dough, this dough gets discarded on beaches and the sand becomes Berkely and it also has little balls of lead in it. Like an industrial museum of the twentiethe century: the lake!

Take a away his phallic joystick, bring him to the shores of the disco beach, replace the joystick with a fly rod and a tiny bundle of lead in mylar. Emplace a rhythmic throbbing beat, and whip the air with your sparkle-ball.