Pipe Dream? Digital presets for DD-5

[Faldoe]

I've heavily modded and rehoused my DD-5 but I want to do more. I'd like rehouse again and build/program something where I can have presets - maybe 4 or 8. With the ability to also have saved in them the High-Cut mod. I have a 3 toggle switch for either having the high-cut Off, or two different value caps.

I've never coded or programmed. How difficult would this be to achieve?

[pd~]

Doable but impractical. Without coding experience that side of things is going to be pretty daunting; the hardware hackery won't be easy either.

The most basic Arduino (a small footprint one, like the Micro) could handle this. You'd need to unhook the DD5's pots and route them into the Arduino's ADC, then have the Arduino control a 4 channel digital potentiometer with the DD5 pots, each channel taking the place of one of the original pots. You may get some undesirable audio artifacts depending on the digipot's specs. I'm pretty sure Chasebliss uses vactrols and PWM rather than digipots for their effects, but I don't think you'd need to do that here.

The toggle switch would also hook into the ADC; I'm not sure how the high-cut mod is implemented but having the micro open/close switching FETs connected to the caps might work.

Presets are a matter of saving and recalling the desired values from the EEPROM.

With some additional work you could even add a tempo LED, subdivisions and tap functionality, but it might not be 100% accurate.


Look up Arduino tutorials on the basics, digital control, analog control, working with digipots and EEPROM to get an idea of what you're getting into.

[Bartimaeus]

If you're ok with just a few presets, you could always have a few rows of trim pots that you switch between. It would be a pain to tweak them, but it would make it much easier. Alternately, this could be a separate mod to tide you over until you devise a way to have a full digital implementation.

Also, there are chips out there that make tap tempo pretty easy to add. Ex: http://electricdruid.net/tap-tempo-lfo-taplfo-v2d/

[thesmellofrain]

2nd the arduino approach. Should'nt really be that hard if the pots are analog with some light reverse engineering. Read the pot values using the serial printout in arduino with some crocodile wires connected to the pins of the pots into the analog lines of the Arduino. then make a smart little software that stores pot values if you hold down a footswitch and recalls them with a quick step.

Not sure if you'll be able to fit all of this into the DD enclosure thou. You will probably need the place for one extra footswitch and some way of selecting preset.

[thesmellofrain]

But yeah, in short. It would take some slight programming knowledge, but nothing fancy. And bare in mind that the arduino needs power when it is not connected to yr computer as well (5V? not sure)