I’ve only been doing hardware stuff for a year or so and it still blows my mind when PCBs arrive. Holding the physical object after spending so much time looking at it on a screen and thinking abstractly about it feels great. Especially after working almost entirely with digital media up until recently; where the finished product is usually a digital file of some description.
I started learning KiCad last year, after stumbling across the Eurorack Blocks framework by Raphael Dingé. It’s an open source library aimed at making the design and manufacture of Eurorack modules more accessible to people with less software and electronics experience. That being said, there’s still been a learning curve as manual routing of the PCB and understanding the PCB manufacture process are still necessary. But I already managed to make a working Eurorack oscillator with it (with expert SMD soldering help from a friend), so ERB definitely should take a lot of credit. If I can do it, then anyone can and that’s mission statement accomplished for ERB.
So this module is a performance looper. I want a module that works as a Boss RC-505, but much smaller. So I can use it for live techno. I saw Blawan using the Boss unit, so I got one but it didn’t really feel intuitive for me performing with multiple bulky bits of gear. There are other Eurorack loopers out there but none of them is really quite what I want so I thought this would be a good project. Most of the through hole components have arrived now, so it just needs soldering together and we’ll find out if it works. That feels highly improbable but as far as I’m aware, there’s no reason it shouldn’t.
Unless I’ve made some critical error (entirely possible), it could be up and running in a couple of weeks. At that point I’ll post some videos on YouTube, etc.