[sdiy] SDIY and Quality.

Wed Jun 6 19:43:17 CEST 2018

Roman,

Thanks.

At some point I've been thinking about writing a 'manifesto' about this. But that would be a winter project.

No worries about bombs, but look out for 14KV being routed from the high tension power lines to your synth.

One sad thing about the quality of DIY is that there are things that are cropping up in the HW/SW industry also. Most things are driven by time to market and cost nowadays along with product life (I have a 60 year old oscilloscope that still works) so engineering and quality suffer.

We use to spec out things with product specs (what it does from a marketing standpoint), functional specs (how it operates from an engineering standpoint) and then detailed engineering specs (how the insides work). Now we get a product spec and maybe a functional spec gets written. Code use to be written to pretty tight standards, you'd have what is called style sheets that tell you the format of the code, headers in files, commenting style, variable naming and so on. Now days you're lucky to get any meaningful comments in a code. I did contract/consulting (mostly software) for 35 years and about 1/4 of the stuff was from start to finish. The other stuff was mainly maintenance and feature enhancement which I would spend 40%-60% of my time reverse engineering the code to modify it.

Jay S.

-----Original Message-----
From: Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org] On Behalf Of Roman Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2018 12:13 AM
To: synth-diy at synth-diy.org
Subject: Re: [sdiy] History of SDIY?

For someone growing up behind Iron Curtain all of this was out of reach.
There were only 3 magazines published here in Poland, with rare mention 
of anything synth-related. But it was enough to light me up and 
determine my choices in future life.
It was a few years after I've had enough of synth DIY up to the point 
that I never wanted to make analog synth again, when I found this SDIY 
mailing list. Until then I haven't heard any of those names, didn't know 
about existence of Electronotes, PAiA, Synapse, you name it.
In fact I was really surprised to find out that DIY is so strong in the 
"free world" where you can simply buy everything, so there's no reason 
to DIY anything at all.

Roman

PS, I liked your rant, Jay. Asking for more.

W dniu 2018-06-06 o 00:16, Jay Schwichtenberg pisze:
> I guess I'd might say Ray Wilson for the current generation. But for me I'd
> go with John Simonton which probably got a lot of people interested in SDIY
> that have contributed to SDIY to get it to where it is today. I never built
> a Gnome but I started out with the 4700 kit and built a number of other PAiA
> kits and never had any issues with them (well other than the crappy power
> supply in the 4700). But then too I could read schematics and use a meter.
> 
> Currently I only have a Blacet Frac system that I built from kits. I can't
> say enough good stuff about John's kits. Well designed and the documentation
> is pretty good. You aren't going to get detailed build instructions (like
> install resistor X here, more like install resistors) but if you're patient
> (like read the instructions before construction and get a plan going) and
> have decent tools they're no problem.
> 
> Like or don't like what I say below. It's my opinion, don't need to start a
> flame war over it. And this is the main reason I'm not really interested in
> SDIY history.
> 
> As far as DIY PCBs and kits go now days I think most suck. I'm going to be
> building some Euro stuff and I'm dreading that. Most people that turn out
> that stuff don't have a clue on how to do an electronics project. After
> spending a day working with electronics and software problems (I'm an
> embedded/bare metal HW/SW engineer by day) I just want to come home and
> build stuff and make sounds. I don't want to deal with poor schematics (if
> you get them), screwed up BOMs and crappy circuit boards. At least the
> documentation part of this you don't need to be an engineer. All you have to
> do is pay attention to details and go over things until they are complete.
> Design and PCB layout it wouldn't hurt to have an engineering background but
> here educating yourself, being thorough and paying attention to details will
> get the job done.
> 
> Enough said, I can rant on this for quite a while.
> 
> Happy noise making.
> Jay S.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org] On Behalf Of David
> G Dixon
> Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2018 2:21 PM
> To: 'Gordonjcp'; synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] History of SDIY?
> 
> I would say that, for the current generation of synth DIYers, Ray Wilson is
> infinitely more important than John Simonton.
> 
> When I was 12 (back in 1977), a neighbor kid bought a PAiA Gnome kit, and we
> tried to put it together.  My dad was a ham radio guy, so he had some
> electronics gear in our basement, and I had made some simple crystal radios
> and such.  I remember the documentation for the kit being almost impossible
> to follow.  Specifically, I remember there being something about all the
> transistors being oriented the wrong way in the schematic.  Long story
> short, we never did get that Gnome kit to work, and I gave up on synth DIY
> (even though I was obsessed with synthesizers).
> 
> Fast forward to 2008, when I discovered Music From Outer Space on the
> internet.  Decent circuits, great explanations, and before long I was making
> my own gizmos in my garage.  A couple of years later I was designing synth
> modules professionally.  It's all because of the excellent start I got from
> Ray Wilson (RIP).
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org] On
>> Behalf Of Gordonjcp
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2018 1:17 PM
>> To: synth-diy at synth-diy.org
>> Subject: Re: [sdiy] History of SDIY?
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 05, 2018 at 01:42:05PM -0500, Quincas Moreira wrote:
>>> I'll add Yves Usson, Ray Wilson and Ken Stone!
>>
>> They're the New Wave Upstarts, surely? :-D
>>
>> Have we had Tom Gambles yet?  He's maybe a little more
>> oldschool than them.
>>
>> --
>> Gordonjcp
>> _______________________________________________
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