I just recently acquired an old Kurzweil 1200 Pro 1 synthesizer. I’ve had to replace the LCD screen as the electro-luminescent backlighting on the old one was pretty faded. I put in a new LED backlit one, and had to cut down the screw posts to fit the deeper profile in, and added a small pot inline to set the contrast. It’s now very clear, and the unit sounds pretty sweet – (in a sort of 90’s synth way).

I’m now starting to get to grips with all it’s many features, and am developing a MIDI application to control the unit as I go along, so far I’ve got full front panel control and display working. Next step is to get full control of all the many synth parameters and layer settings.

The application is being developed in Linux using the excellent Juce class library – see http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce.php for an overview. The beauty of the Juce libraries is that they can be easily recompiled to target Windows and Mac (and iOS/Android too but I’m not familiar with those areas yet). It’s main strength is it’s good support for music devices, both MIDI and audio. This extends to developing VST applications too.

If anyone is impressed (or even just interested), by the swirly graphic images I use in some of my banners, then I’d recommend you head over to http://fyre.navi.cx/ and take a look at the Fyre fractal program. It allows you to generate an almost infinite range of random graphics. This is free software, and I think it’s Linux and Windows capable – I’m running Linux, and it works great here.

Take a look at their banner page and you’ll get a quick idea of what it’s capable of.

I’ve been doing some work for the Perth Linux user group – PLUG for their AV project. I’ve added a Tally Light page to document the process of how I designed them – please take a look and let me know what you think. The article is here: Tally Light.

The whole project is going to be run as an open source effort, so I’ll be publishing the circuit design, all the AVR source code, and any supporting scripts we need.

Gekkotek is starting to grow it’s profile. We are a small Australian company based in Perth, WA that specialises in development of complete hardware/software solutions based on AVR microcontrollers.

Over the coming weeks, we will start showcasing some of the products we have developed.