I’ve been busy preparing stuff for the exhibition in Dundee this week that ties up my Arts Council funded residency with DJCAD. The exhibition is called Innovation and Creative Development in Craft and runs from Thursday 10th June to Saturday 26th June in the Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee, Old Hawkhill, Balfour Street, Dundee, DD1 [...]

Have made some progress today with the two next versions of Niftymitter:  The plan is to update the general PCB layout from 0.24/0.25, add the volume attenuator feature and improve the tuning interaction, and call this Niftymitter Guts, which will be v0.3. Then am working on two new sleeve designs: one for the home, called [...]

Here’s what I’m thinking for the next version of Niftymitter – a bit of a rejig, with the sleeve rotated in relation to the contents so that one can slide things back and forth to gain access to the increased number of controls (tuning, volume, on/off). Signified here by pinboard pins.

Jonny has sent in these pictures, and some more information about his setup: “Here’s some pics of the nifty meter in action. We use a yamaha mixer at our gigs. We plug our mics and guitars into it and also an ipod with our ‘bossa nova’ backing tracks. The outputs are sent to powered speakers [...]

In light of the results from some of the testing, I am considering diverging niftymitter into two families: one for portable/home use, and a more robust version for use with PA and musical equipment. Both will have an improved retuning process and the portable version will have a input volume control, as described by Andrew. [...]

Have been updating the parts list for v0.25, including trying to find a better trimcap that can actually be adjusted by hand, or hacked in such a way as to make that possible. Found this one on rapid that might be more suitable. Have also ordered in some hand adjustable 50k resistors to implement Andrew’s [...]

Openthing and Niftymitter will be appearing in an exhibition at DJCAD as of Thursday, entitled Futurecraft. The exhibition marks the end of the Past Present and Future Craft research project, and kicks of their Scotland wide Craft Festival. Find it on Level 5 of the Matthew building.

This in from Jonny: Hi Roy, sorry for delay, things have been pretty hectic. We managed to use the nifty meter at the gig! I took a short video. Jonny’s Niftymitter testing report from Open Thing on Vimeo. The band is a duo comprising of 2 guitars and 2 vocals. Too make the sound bigger [...]

This is what I’ve got from Trevor so far: I don’t want to send it back Having been set back by dodgy weather and poor service from Royal Mail I got off to a late start. The main feedback I have is around the tuning. It was a bit of a pain as you correctly [...]

Have been updating the issue list this morning, with those in so far from testers Jonny, Trevor, Andrew and Nathaniel. Good stuff everyone, keep them coming.. Biggest issues are around the tuning, unsurprisingly really, which needs to be addressed in all cases. I think Andrew’s suggestion for an attenuator inline would be a great feature [...]