Modular synthesizers: music fan or not, these are a maker’s wet dream!

💖💖Just look at this. Even if you don’t know how to use it or what it’s for, I know you like it and you want it. Kindly let me tell you what this is: it’s audio electronics at its creative best. Start with a signal generator, feed that to the input of an effects card (a module) and tune/ change some of the signal characteristics. Then feed the output of that to another card and repeat. At the end of the chain, you get a magical, beautiful sound. Put those sounds together in sequence and you get music!

• Know more in general.

• know even more (a little more advanced).

• Make your own module (for serious makers).

• Listen to one of these things (YouTube short).

🥧 You can have your industrial Pi and eat it too.

It’s one thing to use a raspberry pi as a pi-hole at home but it’s quite another to use it to control industrial equipment. “Raspberry Pi” = “fun and amateurish” and “Professional grade PLCs” = “serious and the only proper way to go industrial”. Let me tell you a secret: I am a controls and instrumentation guy. I think that a “serious” PLC like Siemens or Beckhoff is an absolute must in many applications. There is reliability, safety, capacity and many other things (including simple trust) that come with those brands. But the Pi PLC makes sense in some applications. I have used it when I needed Linux for processing data, yet I needed little or no I/O. The applications were far from critical too. I also think that these systems fit “amateurish” applications thar require an extra level or reliability (think home automation systems, for example). What do you think? Here are some links to start you on this topic:

• Industrial shields (manufacturer, the leftmost device on the picture).

• Berghof automation (manufacturer, center).

• Revolution Pi (manufacturer, the last, very orange device).

Deeply seek to run Deepseek (actually run any open LLM locally)

(This post is not really about Deepseek but I thought I’d ride that wave for fun. Hilarious.) Ever thought about integrating AI on your next project? Of course you have! Regardless of the over-hype, AI is undoubtedly a powerful technology and we, tech nerds, all know it. It’s actually quite easy to run an LLM locally. I know because I have done it and if I have done it, you can do it too. In my case, I used a Linux machine (with an extremely modest discrete Nvidia GPU) and Ollama - it runs most 7 to 8B parameters models very well, which is enough for a lot of applications I can think of (we’ll discuss some of these applications on a later TTWM issue). Interested? To get you on your way, I recommend one video and one video only which was all that I used (here’s the YouTube link and thank me later).

A cool maker product you can buy - Micro Journal Rev.6

It’s a beautiful thing when makers create something and then make it available to others through open sourcing their designs and software. But what about if you have your own projects and have no time to replicate other people’s creations? Well, if you’re lucky, you can buy it, readymade, directly from the creator. The item I show case this time is the Micro Journal Rev.6, a distraction free portable writer. It helps you focus on writing in the moment, with drafts wirelessly syncing to Google Drive, ready for export to your software of choice when it’s time to edit. Experience a smooth creative process and improved productivity. Wow, what a great implementation. Wait, what? You didn’t know this was a thing?

Know more and possibly buy the Micro Journal Rev.6 from here - support our fellow makers.

That’s all folks!

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