NEW UK DESIGNED & BUILT THEREMIN with volume loop & pitch rod etc

"IMO, almost everything that can be pushed off and done in software should be" - Dewster

;-) ... I have worked with, and as, almost all the "roles" one can have in electronics.. Digital hardware dev, software dev, analogue, system.. And I have come to the conclusion that the technology is almost irrelevant .. What is relevant is the competence of those performing the design tasks.

Warning.. Longwinded boring blurb follows.. ;-)....

So I would say that anything which can be "pushed off" into the area where the designer is most competent, should be.. And that in the case of a project with various possible implementations, there is no "right" or "wrong" about what is done in analogue, what is done in hardware, and what is done in software - It all comes down to total cost (including development time) and this often depends more on the competencies of the team than the price of components.

You can probably implement a superb theremin which is predominantly software based, I probably couldnt.. I can probably implement a superb theremin which is predominantly analogue, and you possibly couldnt... Both are likely to be as reliable as each other, have aproximately the same component cost, and (at the rate you and I are going, LOL ;-) have similar development time / overheads..

I have seen many more utterly hopeless professional firmware developers than I have met utterly hopeless professional analogue developers .. But analogue developers are far fewer in number so this is probably why.. And when it comes to contractors, I have never seen any group of engineers who take their client for an expensive ride and deliver over complicated dangerous product than the firmware development crowd..

Who else would have the audacity to "engineer" the concept of putting product to market (even in things like cars) which is buggy or doesnt work, and provide downloadable "patches" which the purchaser must install in their non or sub-functional product to make it work? .. LOL, its astounding.. Sell a product which is effectively a prototype, and do the development remotely, with the purchaser acting as yout testing team! LOL ;-)

Fred.

"If you mean me, you're right - my dilettante grasp of electronics is woeful. " - GordonC

No, I didnt mean you!  ;-)  ... IMO,  "grasp of electronics" should not be a requirement for a user of an electronic product.. Sadly, the theremin being what it is, more understanding is required than usual - particularly if one wants to get the best from the instrument.. Understanding of the basic function of capacitance being, I believe, the most important.

"I would get very frustrated at the quality of computer software and hardware, except I understand that while "right first time" is possible, a computer that is nearly 100% reliable is not something I want "

Warning.. Longwinded boring blurb follows.. ;-)....

I think there is some confusion here.. AFAICS, the immense "power" of modern microprocessors is often utterly wasted - their speed and resources gobbled up by inefficient high-level programming.. People throw a DSP PIC into products where an old 6303 8 bit MCU programmed at assembly  level by someone competent, would do the same job.... Ok, the cost of the new parts is the same sort of price as the old 6303 used to be, but the extra complexity and inefficient code used for the new part makes it less reliable..

Yes - There are things impossible to achieve with an old MCU - But most of the time a simpler MCU will do the job.

I think the "problem" is "box thinking" - MCU development moved too quickly - people (like me) were excited by the newer parts, so jumped ship frequently, never spending long enough on any part or archetecture to fully utilise its potential - Modular software concepts came on the scene to enable transfer of software from one part to the next, and these became libraries of standard functions or "boxes"... All great at high level - But down at product development level, down in the MCUs fitted in washing machines and control boards - particularly anything where failure is dangerous, one (IMO) needs to fully understand every operation.. And when one did (I stuck with the TMS9900 which was a wonderful MCU, for many years, and with the Cosmac processors) there was a chance that it would "bite the dust" in the competition, and your investment would be less valuable - Those opting for Intel made the right choice IMO, even though their processors were (are) horrible.

And standard libraries containing ready built code modules with often clumsy interfacing to these modules, hides what the MCU is doing.. And when one dissasembles the code and looks at what has been generated for some simple function, one finds horrors which chill the blood..

"it would use a processor that is more than twenty years old (by which time there is a good chance that all the bugs in it have been found and documented), be capable of only a few well defined tasks (probability of bugs increases exponentially with complexity) and outrageously expensive (the cost of thorough debugging is prohibitive.)"

I think the opposite could be true (certainly at the level of MCUs in reasonably simple board-level designs) - Processor bugs etc would not only be documented, but fixed - The "few well defined tasks" would be the opcodes.. so tasks required on a simple design could be implemented, even if the particular sequence of instructions had never been done before. The MCU would be simple so debugging would focus on the code, without the problems of complex interactions one gets with more complex hardware.

Not much of the above applies to personal computers or complex products requiring a lot of computing power (one could not implement the EH Talking Machine in a system using an old 8 bit MCU, one would need a board full of electronics in addition to the MCU).. But one does not need " nearly 100%" reliability for something like that... One does need it for cars and aircraft and satilites.

For me though, it gets a bit "personal" - Even if something I design appears to work well, I have a deep uneasy feeling if I do not know exactly whats going on inside it.. Just been bitten a few too many times by trusting the specification for some software module I put in my product, which doesnt tell the truth - or at least not the whole truth.

This happened to me in my early days with the PSoC, where I relied on the specification for the MDAC User module, and it was a pack of lies - or at least never disclosed major limitations - (the data has since been changed following a big hoo-ha) - It all worked well, but prior to full testing being completed, was taken (despite my protests) and put into a motor for an electric vehicle, where it crashed causing about £50k in costs and lost investment..

So I now write my own software interfaces for the PSoC, in assembler.. And, whilst things like theremins are not critical, I dont want to get a call from someone with a problem that I cannot understand.. I want to know every aspect of the design, and if I include a MCU, this means understanding every line of code in the MCU.. And this means that if a line of code calls a function, I must understand every line of code in that function - So pre-compiled object modules without their source are not used by me.

And doing the above is much slower.. :-(

Fred.

I attended an electronic music retreat over the weekend. Out of the 28 attendees (including me) one person ordered an LW3 online within minutes of trying mine, another ordered one today and two more intend to buy one. (*)

Concusion - get the price and the look right and give them reasonable functionality and theremins will sell like hot cakes to the right audience. :-)

(*) Of which two already own etherwaves amongst their collection of electronic instruments, and for the other two this is their first theremin.)

Hi Gordon,

Those statistics may look exciting, but the sale of 4 theremins with perhaps a profit of £50 each, to a "right audience" of 28 is not something that would convince any investor I have ever met ;-)

And this is the problem - to earn even £500 a month, one needs to sell 10 per month - directly - If one goes through retail channels, one is looking at perhaps selling 20 per month to get a return of £500 per month..

Its all fine if one is a hobby industry where one is able to build the stuff yourself for fun, dont factor in your time or development time, and have another source of income you depend on.. then one can sell your "hot cakes" and make some pocket money.

If you are a fool like me, dont see (or ignore) the realities, and spend more on trying to develop something good than you could ever recover from sales in this "market", well - you pay the price..

The LW3 will bring its developer an income, and even taking his development costs into account, he is probably now actually making money - He got it right, was astute enough to see what people really wanted, never wasted time and effort on consulting thereminists, and put his simple unit on the market .. Provided he never wasts his energy and money on trying to cater for the virtually non-existant high-end market, he should stay solvent.

For me, if I have any hope (which I doubt ;-) I think it is (as you rightly said years ago) with the synth crowd.. If I had not been so pedantic about getting everything right, I could be in that market now..

Alas, this whole field is better suited to hobbyists than to engineers - Impose engineering "standards" to what one develops, get "bogged down" thinking about reliability and compliance and things like that, and one is on the wrong path - Trying to make a good reliable theremin which can be manufactured easily and caters for all the conflicting demands of possible purchasers, at an affordable price - LOL, I have been a fool!

Fred.

"If I had not been so pedantic about getting everything right, I could be in that market now.."  -- FredM

Making junk like everyone else! ;-)  (I keed, I keed)

IMO building musical instruments is a labor of love first, a possible income a distant second.  It can't be any other way with something so intimate.  And the world needs more people caring intensely about what they do, there's just no replacement for it.

LOL, I had to look up "I keed, I keed" ;-)

Yes - I agree with all you say..

And the truth is that I deluded myself - My love has always been for electronic music / musical instruments.. Its what I wanted to do.

I had a situation where I had some money, no work coming in, and a PSoC consultancy business where one major client went bust, and the other took on defense contracts.. So I thought - Ill use this time to quickly knock a (mostly digital PSoC based) theremin together .. Should take me about 6 months to produce something far superior to what's on the mid-end (EW) market..

The rest is history - I should have packed it in after 6 months, shouldn't have chased the disastrous 3d idea without actually thinking about whether such a machine would be playable.. but I went on and on, throwing everything at "correcting" the "flaws" and incorporating "needed features".. Other work which came in made profit, but this profit just got gobbled up by funding my obsession.

I think this can be a problem if your "hobby" is closely related to your "profession" - I wanted to spend my time on the theremin development - it was exciting and creative and I was learning from it all the time.. But I was deluding myself into believing it was a business venture - that it could be regarded as "work" .. Oh, it was work, damn hard work - but not work which could or would ever have payback... I should have been concentrating on that kind of work and relegated the theremin to background "hobby" status.

All I can do is to sound this warning for others - I dont actually think anything can save me from complete and total wipe-out now.. And actually, "rubbish" or not - There is no "wrong" in providing people with "rubbish" if thats what they want! - I could have put out a lot of what I would regard as "rubbish" that many people would have been happy with - I even regarded my H1 as "rubbish" despite it having been liked by someone who wanted to use it for a major performance - So I set about redesigning it completely for him, got sick, and he never had any theremin of mine to play at the event and used an EW! -

One cannot save someone from their own stupidity, LOL ;-) - And I have just been bloody stupid.

Fred.

Fred, I think it's the world that is messed up, not you.  They're basically minting money and forking it by the bale-full to anyone who will make new and better weaponry, but those of us who have an irrational aversion to getting the blood of small children on our hands often have to make do with essentially nothing.

I used to work for a large telecom and in the distant past the old timers had loads of spare time to do whatever interested them and to build stuff freely in the labs.  What did we get from that?  C, C++, Unix, discovery of the universal microwave background, etc. 

With the cessation of the bell system gravy train, work was reduced to grinding out the next project and squeezing in whatever fun might be had between the cracks.  I probably learned more in the "cracks" time than any other, and much of it was directly applicable to company projects.  Now that I have several hours a day freed up to code on my processor (on average, had to field strip the wash machine yesterday - blea!) I feel my skills are likely beyond those I might have developed for hire.  (Though external projects can be a great way to force one to branch out and learn new areas.)  Our savings are slowly evaporating and that makes us a bit nervous, but what is one to do when faced with the decision of wasting one's life doing boring projects for money, or spend one's life doing super fascinating projects and expanding one's mind - but doing it for free/peanuts?  It's often literally a "your money or your life" dichotomy.

Anyway, your oscillator and mixer technologies seem quite advanced and elegant, and your shielding methods are quite interesting and highly promising.  You individually could blow the doors off the Theremin/synth "industry"!  It's the world's fault that there isn't ready money in it, and that's a shame.  Creative people need time and space and room and board and a bit of minor funding here and there, and I would bet that in the end most would push their chosen field forward, perhaps a lot.  Monetary benefit isn't a consideration when funding weapons of war (indeed it's a massive drain on the system with generally horrific results) so why are we so miserly when it comes to mining our most valuable resource - raw human creativity?

It's tough out there for creative types, particularly so for the ones who work best in tiny groups or alone.

Thanks you Dewster for your kind words,

The reality though is that, like it or lump it, we must live in this messed up world - Ignoring the realities is not a good survival stratergy, no matter how creative one is.. Oh, some "realities" I refuse to embrace - The "If you dont take this defence job, someone else will - you arent going to stop it or change anything or make any difference.." Is probably true (well, it is true).. My (presently divorcing me) wife has taken this line. I asked her - "if there was a one in a million chance that one of our children could be killed, but for taking that chance, we got a million pounds - would you take that chance?"..

Trouble is that its ok if its someone elses kids..  "But you wouldnt actually be designing the weapon - just the control for the motor which moves the turret.." Yeah .. And watch on late news some tank target a block of flats with innocents inside.. I have real trouble right now sleeping, for worry about the way divorce and my leaving, and all the disruption will affect my children - At least I dont have the horror of thoughts about what my "employment" actions could have caused to other children, to deal with.

"Our savings are slowly evaporating and that makes us a bit nervous, but what is one to do when faced with the decision of wasting one's life doing boring projects for money, or spend one's life doing super fascinating projects and expanding one's mind - but doing it for free/peanuts?"

My advice, from the pit I am in at present? Do enough "boring projects for money" to keep your funds from depleting, if you can.. Because if you lose your home and have no money, you could face what I am staring at.. The inability to do "super fascinating projects and expanding one's mind" simply because you wouldnt be in a position to do them, even if you had spare time. 

Please dont get me wrong - I am not trying to discourage you... Everything depends on your personal circumstances, and probably depends more on the person/s you share your life with than anything else..

All I know is that if I can prevent anyone from the hell I am in right now, and failed to do so, I would feel guilty.. Keep your eyes open, watch for cracks, beware - IMHO (I really hope I am wrong) Times are likely to get (much) worse financially, everywhere.. And those who have been "wasting" their time on creativity which doesnt bring a quick buck are likely to be worst hit I think.

Fred.

I just discovered an undesirable quirk of my LV-3.  I'm not sure if it is unique to this model or not.  While using it in battery-powered mode with a battery-powered amp (i.e. no ground to AC mains), I discovered that the front grill of my amp acts as a second pitch antenna, to some degree.  I haven't yet tested to see if this effect goes away with either the theremin or amp plugged in with an AC adapter.

Is this a phenomenon common to all or most theremins?  Or could it be a side-effect from running on battery power?  I've never noticed it before.

"While using it in battery-powered mode with a battery-powered amp (i.e. no ground to AC mains), I discovered that the front grill of my amp acts as a second pitch antenna, to some degree.  I haven't yet tested to see if this effect goes away with either the theremin or amp plugged in with an AC adapter." - Rickreid

 See the comments on grounding in this thread: Battery Supply for EW ? (condensed and meaningful posts)

I think you will find the answer here.

"Is this a phenomenon common to all or most theremins?  Or could it be a side-effect from running on battery power?  I've never noticed it before."

All theremins have two* "antennas" determining pitch and volume - one of these is usually invisible (and common to both pitch and volume) and it is ground! (*actually, one could say 3 antennas - one for pitch, one for volume, and one "invisible" ground "antenna" or "return path" - The capacitance between each "real" antenna is between this antenna and the "ground antenna")

All of which is explained in laborious detail in the above thread.. But bottom line is that if your ground antenna is poor (as in, ground is not connected to a good ground 'radiator' which doesnt vary with player proximity) then you will get the kind of effects you are seeing - and this applies to all theremins.

Fred.