PLAN B analog blog

In the next day or so I'm going to be posting a photo of the 
prototype Milton engine.  Warnng you ahead of time, there's not a 
lot to look at - and this is a very good thing.  

Currently we have all counting functions operational (start/stop, 
hold, reset, obedient clock, manual advance) and are now 
attacking VC direction, VC gate and skip step - and there's only 
about 15 parts required to do all of  this!  Compare that to the 
Milton 1 at over 150 parts for less functionality and you'll 
understand my excitement.  More jam for less money - that 
doens't happen all too often.

The addition of VC direction and VC gate will add a whopping 
(not) four parts to the melange, three of them caps (!)  as we've 
opted for the powerful MAX1111 octal 8 bit serial A to D for the 
direction and gate processing - a single A to D chip which 
multiplexes eight discrete analog inputs and only spends one of 
the processor's I/O's.  This is the beauty of working with 
processors - additional features which would previously require 
much hardware become instead a few lines of code.  Everything 
from Midi control to switch debouncing can be done with S/W. 
And until we're at the point that onboard RAM usage becomes 
critical, adding this code isabsolutely free to the end user.  

The entire Miiton routine however should take less than 1K of 
RAM - so we don't see any problems whatsoever. This is going 
to be one heck of a joybox when it's done.

- P