Inspired by Paul Maddox’s Gorf, STEP-8 was developed as a personal project to develop my electronics and programming skills.
The main board design is fully self contained and features 8 x Potentiometers for note data entry, 8 x Buttons and 8 x LEDs contained in the buttons. There is also 1 x Rotary Encoder and an LCD for menu navigation.
Two hardware faults were identified and rectified:
- LCD contrast resistor.
- Button multiplexor lines.
The initial firmware was pretty basic, but proved that my hardware was working as intended. All but the Rotary Encoder – my limited understanding stopped me from getting it going. I was happy that the rest of the design was working as intended and this is how the STEP-8 remained until 2015.
electronics for music 