MacroFab Engineering Podcast #176
Some Impedance or Whatever – Nick Chelyapov with Bitty
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June 12, 2019, Episode #176
- A freelance Interactive Art Director and Graphic Designer
- Born in Moscow, Russia and raised in Los Angeles, California
- Nick has worked on a wide variety of art direction and graphic design projects
- Nick started Bitty, a pocket drum machine, 3 and a half years ago
- “I think the edge that I have to bring to a hardware product is graphic design”
What is the bitty?
- Kickstarter project
- A pocket drum machine
- Specs on Bitty
- Sine / square / saw / triangle waves (it’s all there, noise too.)
- Sample playback – 16khz samples
- Polyphony – 4 voices is easy, depending on the complexity of the patch, 8-16 voices is possible
- Filters – Low Pass, High Pass, Band Pass, Notch
- Patterns / Arpeggiation
How did you get into hardware design from graphic design?
- Product look and feel
- Process of iterations? What do you look for in the design?
Links and Callouts
Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!
Nick Chelyapov of Curious Sound Objects and Bitty.
The Bitty pocket drum machine.
Illustration of the Bitty pocket drum machine labeling the functionality of the buttons and knobs.
Owen Trueblood on the left did the first PCB design of the Bitty. Gavin Lund on the right working on the latest version of the Bitty.
About the Hosts
Parker Dillmann
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!