rwillett

>> Then use chisels and carpenters mallet to accurately cut the outline to around 10 mm deep: Thats where I've been going wrong, I use the chisels and carpenters mallet to inaccurately cut out something thats fairly close to the outline and at variable depth between 5mm and 15mm. Basically the dog could have chewed the hole with more accuracy than me and hand tools... In all seriousness I love watching craftsmen work and explaining how they do it. I will never approach this level of ability, so I can appreciate this all the more. Following this thread with great interest. Rob

After a lot of to and fro with their customer support (who were very good), and downloading loads of different tones, playing through a Fender Jazz and an El Cheapo Precision Bass Clone I never managed to get it sounding like I'd like it to. I did try it with a Westone 6-string electric and the Spark Go sounded very good indeed and if I was just after a little practise amp for lead and rhytmn practise, I'd keep the Spark Go, no questions at all. Also playing songs through Bluetooth from my iPhone was very good. Not quite as good as my Bose Soundlink but not bad at all. I'm kinda tempted to keep it and give it to my daughter who is learning to play guitar but I have a little Marshall practise amp thats probably better suited to her. We also have a NUX Mighty Plug which is even simpler to use than the Spark Go, the NUX is headphones only but thats the tradeoff for such a small size. I think the Spark Go is a great little amp for just everybody apart from bass players, so it'll have to go back, which is sad, because it's got so many things going for it, just not for me Rob

No, no, must resist, must resist.....

This is why I shouldn't read Basschat when tidying my home office. I get distracted and start thinking stupid thoughts like "Mmm fancy a decent active p bass". Must resist and keep on tidying, must not look on guitarbuild.co.uk. .

Some people have said that I play the bass as I use a chainsaw, badly, dangerously and with little regard for anybody around me. Actually now I think about, just everybody says that.... I can state though, that up until now, I haven't lost any fingers playing bass, however I still have time. I did lose the end of my little finger in a non-music related accident, but I still don't play like Tommi Iommi though

Given the price of fuel (and wood pellets in particular) these days, I'd actually say it's quite cheap ....

Spark support have come back to help, likely to be the weekend before I get chance to pull a video together to demonstrate the issue. I would have thought other people on here would have a Spark Go and couldcomment. Rob

@Greg Edwards69 Thanks for the update, its on my list to try it out, My Ampeg has a line in, just time to actually do things seems difficult to find Do you simply take the stereo output and plug it in to the amp, or do you use an adaptor to combine them into mono or some other way of doing this. All information welcomed. Rob

Wow.... Hold on, I've got a bridge for sale somewhere

Just to blow your mind, apparently there is an Object Orientated Fortran. that’s way beyond my skill level as I’ve never used Fortran at all. Happy about that and will keep it that way. just downloaded FreeRTOS and will see if the pick simulator will handle it

Downloaded a fair few bass setups and the Spark Go is not much better, I have it on my desk and its not much louder than them. Music played through the iPhone is actually really good and loud enough. Playing through the bass is tinny and not good. headphones are better but I already have a NUX Mighty Plug. I really, really want to like this, but the bass guitar volume output is so low and so tinny, it's not usable in my view. The speaker is so small, I can't see how it can even pump out the bass. If anybody else has one on a bass guitar, let me know your views, otherwise it's not good enough and is going back. If it was £50-£60 I'd keep it for the iPhone, but at over £100, there are better bluetooth speakers. Rob

I still remember downloading Yyradsil (?) Linux via UUCP in the early 90's. It's come on along way since then. I have some verison of BSD on our FreeNAS server, no idea what it is as it just works and has never gone wrong. It sounds like you're now using n threads in the RTOS kernel to handle n buttons so letting the kernel handle the threads (and hence the buttons), so once you get one button thread right, the kernel will manage all the rest of the buttons on your behalf. Rather than solve a difficult problem, solve two simpler ones. Let the kernel do what it does best and you manage the details of the buttons. It sounds like you're then putting the output all those nice isolated threads into a single threaded queue, I was thinking why are you doing that? I was thinking "If the MIDI is ready then just send it". Does MIDI require headers and footers, so you need to know the packet contents before you send it, perhaps the number of midi commands or length, or does it have a start and end limiters, so you have to know what the start and end is? Therefore you have to have it all ready to package it up and then send it? Clearly you know what you're doing, so I'm assuming that you can't just send MIDi as-is directly, you need to know a bit more about it and prepare what needs to be sent, hence the thread safe queue. I'll read up on this. Thanks Rob

thanks. Will do so.

Welcome to the wonderful world of embedded code with all it's limitations We're so used to just using high level libraries and seeing the output immediatly. I did look to see if there was a Pico simulator and saw this https://wokwi.com/projects/new/pi-pico. It has the ability to add hardware such as buttons and displays. Looks simple but I didn't actually try and use it. It looks like you can upload libraries so I wonder if you could get the FreeRTOS libraries up? This might help, thought it might be a waste of time. Rob

Fired the Spark Go amp, connected it to my iPhone and played some music. Sounds nice and loud. Connected it to a Fender Jazz, selected a bass amp and speaker and not so good. Really struggling to get any volume out of it and it sounds tinny with the bottom 'E'. It did sound very loud earlier so not sure what is happening. Sounds better on headphones. I'll keep experimenting but at this moment in time, the NUX Mighty Plug sounds better but is limited as its really headphones only.

It looks nice, it's compact and nicely designed. I'll give it a few more hours and plug a bass in. I'm doing my rugby level 2 coaching award tomorrow, so for once I'm knuckling down and revising.

Just got my Positive Grid Spark Go turn up. I ordered it 29/3/23 so six weeks isn't bad. First impressions about the box are positive (no pun intended), you get the amp suspended in a pretty secure cardboard box with simple instructions, spare straps, a USB cable (It's USB-C based) and a spare grill in a slightly different colour. It comes with a bit of battery in, so I downloaded the Spark app from Apple. It looks very simlar to Bias FX 2 which I have and I like. It has four presets that can be selected in the app or on the top of the amp itself. None are bass orientated which is no surprise and no hardship as the four presets can be overwritten with whatever you like. Easy to connect via bluetooth. On the app itself there are a range of styles to choose from, Pop, Blues, Rock, Metal, Alternate, Bass and Acoustic. In each of the styles there are a few setups, so Bass has "Bass Driver" and "Comped Cleaner" I'm afraid I have no idea what these are based on, so feel free to enlighten me. Along the top of the app are the effect pedals, selecting them makes them show up in a large size on the bottom of the screen and you can change the values of the dials by dragging up and down. Much the same as most apps to be honest, so easy to use and consistent. I've left the amp charging up, not sure how long that will take, once charged I'll plug a bass in and see if it actually works. Rob

I like the look of them. This would match my Westone Thunder six string. However, I agree that £99 is far far too much.

Looks a nice guitar. Never seen one one but do recall the brand now.

Thanks. Appreciate the response rob

But what was it? I can’t work it out and would love to know. However I don’t claim a vast knowledge of bass guitars. I did think an old Westone but couldn’t find any that had the knobs like this. Also the headstock and truss rod cover are different somebody must recognise it surely? rob

Nice thing about HTTP API calls are that they are very standard and there will be a library to save you the pain of doing your own library and, $DEITY forbid, error handling. Rob

Hi Just found this topic and was interested in how it's doing. I had a couple of questions: 1. The Mod Dwarf has three buttons already, so is this four button pedal board in addition to three or to replace the three? 2. Wouldn't it be easier to simply buy something like a Line 6 pedalboard with USB. I have a 2nd hand one that I spent £60 on. Admittedly it doesn't have the little OLEDS for displaying whats going on which is really, really nice, but it does have an expression pedal. I say this as someone who has gone down that rabbit hole far, far too many times. Sometimes I have to slap myself and say is this sensible. To demonstrate how stupid I can be, I was interested in making some hand carved house signs, I ended up building a whole sodding CNC machine, starting with a 3d printer and some plywoood, and even started writing my own design program (in JavaScript) to get the output I wanted. Eventually I came to my senses and donated the CNC machine to the local school who were very grateful and brought some wooden ones for £100. 3. Have you validated that the output of the Mod Dwarf contains enough information for you to keep your pedals in sync? When I first read this, my immediate thoughts were keeping the state of the Mod Dwarf and your pedal board in sync. If you changed the Mod Dwarf, e.g pressed a button to change an effect, then does your pedal board need to have it's state changed to reflect that? 4. Logging on low level hardware is tricky, you don't have all the nice output devices to write to, you can have all the sprintf stuff but you've got to get it out to somewhere you can actualy read it. One thing I thought of (and haven't done anything to validate if this would work), would be embed the debug data in a Midi SysEx mesage and read it on your midi monitor on your laptop. That means you don't need two channels. I looked at SysEx when I was debugging the Line 6 pedalboard to work with Amplitube on a Mac. (Basically the Midi CC message value need to be inverted to keep the lights on pedal board synced with Amplitube, so a 1 becomes a 127 and vice versa, oddly enough Amplitube on an iPad works fine). I was a C/Unix/network developer for too many years (note the lack of C++ in that statement) and have written a lot of low level stuff for Microchip PIC16/18 and Arduino's for astrophotograpy. I have played with FreeRTOS as well, but not for a looong time. You might have inspired me to go back and pull the manuals out and have a play. This is a great thread, please keep it going. Thanks Rob