Historically produce shopping was mostly in open-air markets, but in the US produce is now typically sold in buildings. Most open-air produce sales are probably at farmers markets, but these focus on the high end. I like that Boston's Haymarket more similar to the historical model: competing vendors selling conventional produce relatively cheaply.

It closes for the weekend at 7pm on Saturdays, and since food they don't sell by the end of the market is mostly going to waste they start discounting a lot. You can get very good deals, though you need to be cautious: what's left at the end is often past the end of it's human-edible life.

A few days ago I came upstairs to:

Me: how did you get in there?

Nora: all by myself!

Either we needed to be done with the crib, which had a good chance of much less sleeping at naptime, or we needed a taller crib. This is also something we went through when Lily was little, and that time what worked was removing the bottom of the crib.

This afternoon Lily, Rick, and I ("Dandelion") played our first dance together, which was also Lily's first dance. She's sat in with Kingfisher for a set or two many times, but this was her first time being booked and playing (almost) the whole time.

Lily started playing fiddle in Fall 2022, and after about a year she had enough tunes up to dance speed that I was thinking she'd be ready to play a low-stakes dance together soon. Not right away, but given how far out dances booked it seemed about time to start writing to some folks: by the time we were actually playing the dance she'd have even more tunes and be more solid on her existing ones. She was very excited about this idea; very motivated by performing.

I wrote to a few dances, and while several (very reasonably!) said to send another sample when we had a bit more experience, the Northboro dance said yes for 2024-04-27. This gave a good amount of time to work on things.

With my electronic harp mandolin project I've been enjoying working with analog and embedded audio hardware. And a few weeks ago, after reading about Ugo Conti's whistle-controlled synth I wrote to him, he gave me a call, and we had a really interesting conversation. And my existing combination of hardware for my whistle synth [1] is bulky and expensive. Which has me excited about a new project: I'd like to make an embedded version.

Yesterday I got started on the first component: getting audio into the microcontroller. I want to start with a standard dynamic mic, so I can keep using the same mic for talkbox and whistle synth, so it should take standard balanced audio on XLR as input. In a full version this would need an XLR port, but for now I can pull back the housing on an XLR cable:

While I'm not really at a clear stopping point, I wanted to write up my recent progress with the electronic harp mandolin project. If I go too much further without writing anything up I'm going to start forgetting things. First, a demo:

Or, if you're prefer a different model:

Since last time, I:

• Fixed my interference issues by:

  1. Grounding the piezo input instead of putting it at +1.65v.
  2. Shielding my longer wires.
  3. Soldering my ground and power pins that I'd missed initially (!!)

• Got the software working reasonably reliably.

• Designed and 3D printed a case, with lots of help from my MAS.837 TA, Lancelot.

  

• Dumped epoxy all over the back of the metal plate to make it less likely the little piezo wires will break off.

  

• Revived the Mac version of my MIDI mapper and made a cut down version that is designed to drive a wind instrument synth (code).

While this works, it's a little bulky for attaching to the mandolin. I also don't like having a bunch of wires running from the teeth to the computer and that I only have thirteen of the eighteen inputs hooked up. I've also been enjoying playing it with my fingers, in more of a piano orientation. I decided to make a new version that's all a single board:

The squares show where the "teeth" will go.

I've prepared a new batch of eighteen pluck sensors:

Sanding them smooth was a good fit for watching the kids at the park.

I'm a bit nervous with this design that something will break and it will be hard to repair because it's all on one board, but it's got to be better than the giant blob of epoxy in the v1 design.

If this works well I might make a case for it where only the teeth poke out?

Tomorrow, Lily and I will be leading a Kids Contra Jam at NEFFA (2pm in the Sudbury room!). We'll be playing off of Lily's tune list, but someone was asking about chords. I decided to have a go at writing out the simplest acceptable chords for each of the tunes we're planning. Each letter represents two downbeats: