This year I have two. The first is to re-read and study the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. I’m not a hugely political guy, though Jacob recommended VisibleVote and I have been enjoying that – be involved in politics while you poop! Actually I had this idea before I even knew about VisibleVote. As a US citizen I really should understand the things that define my country. There is quite a bit of rhetoric that pops up from time to time about our rights being infringed by modern politics and I want to know for myself if that is really true. If so, it’s my civil duty to understand what is going on there and the implications.

The second resolution is way more fun but also more expensive and least important :) I want to finish my MB-6582. I have been thinking about either creating a larger case to us with the current design (with some modifications such as using pin headers for both boards) or creating a Rackmount version. While I could finish the former likely in a reasonable time-frame, having a rackmount version would be more useful.

Now that I have my new office, I also have a new rack and find that it’s quite convenient since it’s right in front of my main control synth / keyboard. I basically want to have as much rack-mounted as I can. My SammichSID (the MB-6582’s little brother) currently sits on a rack-mounted table in there for instance. And I can rackmount my GM5x5x5 (which is not part of resolution but is still a good idea).

Another benefit of rackmounting the MB-6582 is that I will have more room in a chassis (which will likely have to be a 3U if I want to use the full control surface) for making the PSU internal, adding extras such as an additional analog filter (which also requires it’s own PSU) among other things.

So far I have not really started reading the Constitution or Bill of Rights, but I have created an first try at a front-panel and replacement modulation matrix (which I plan to have fabbed). Corey was displeased a few days ago when I lost track of time and spent 4 hours designing the modulation matrix board. See one problem is that I have to use my own boards for the front-panel design. Fabbing an entire control surface board would be expensive and EagleCAD only allows for certain sized boards without having to buy a rather expensive license anyway. Thought about using Advanced Circuits which would be cheaper for a large board but I still have the problem of having to deal with the limitations of EagleCAD.

I just realized fixing the website isn’t one of my resolutions but I’ll likely get around to at least making the blog look less sucky. I want to add back in my music section as a WordPress module too so we’ll see how that goes (some awesome news on the music front, but I’ll save that for later).

Anyways it should be fun! Happy New Year everyone!