Eureka! moments so far turning out to be old hat

[onboard]

I know this has been covered before with respect to the fact that there are new ideas waiting for some open mind to realize them. But the "Eureka!" factor in my tinkering has been nill.

When I found the EA tremolo, I deliberately did not look for mods. Eureka,  drive a status LED off the LFO! Cool! Oh, dang, there's the ROG version. Hey, the LFO speed can be switched into two ranges without changing cap values! Oh, there's Andy's double speed mod.

Wait a minute, I can take the LFO, hook it up to a fliter with the JFET as the variable resistance to ground, and get a simple phaser/ leslie type circuit - awsome! Oh dang, there's the ROG Phozer.

Hmmm, ok how about approaching the Tychobrahe Octavia with opamps instead of transistors? Fantastic!   Rats, there's the Bobtavia. Wait, I know, use a TS up front - yes! Shoot, there's the Octave Screamer.

Sorry for rant. I should be reassured that I'm learning something if the "Eureka!" moments turn out to be defacto diy material. Talk about being late for the party. Anybody know the story of the Hundredth Monkey?

[R.G.]

Just keep after it. "Eureka" means "I have found it!" not "I'm the first to find it."

And, like my momma used to say, you want to find a prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs.

[JimRayden]

Ewww....

If you want to build The Perfect Fuzzbox, you'll have to smell lots of soldering fumes.

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Jimbo

[Narcosynthesis]

if you can find those things without reading about them first then well done, you may not have got anythign completely new yet, but if you keep at it you will find something new eventually...

David

[JimRayden]

If you have invented something on your own (that has been invented already), you can't take the credit for it, but you can sure be as proud as hell.  

Like, I invented the extended pentatonic before studying any scales. I did it purely by listening to songs. I was sure amazed when reading about the pentatonic.

It was a long time ago.

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Jimbo

[R.G.]

OK, war story time. The first thing I clearly remember inventing was the flying lawn mower. And this one I actually did invent before anyone else that I know of.

When I was in fourth grade, my father bought our first power lawn mower. I had been "delegated" the job of mowing the lawn, and I had been using a reel-type mower. With our new Lawn-boy rotary I was riding high. Well, OK, actually walking high behind it, but you get the drift.

Ground effects machines were first big back then. There were several articles I read about hovercraft boats and speculations about hovercraft cars, and before long I was drawing up lawn mowers with propeller blades and no wheels.

Being a kid, I was unable to arrange financing for the venture, so the idea languished. Some years later I read about the "Flymo" hovercraft lawnmower. Do the search, the really existed, and may still.

Of course, this is an abysmal idea. Think about it - what happens with a mower blade sitting on an insubstantial pillow of air? You get dips, divots, scalping, and no way to adjust height. Not to mention what happens when the thing gets crosswise on a downhill slope. And how does one mow a straight line?

But I was very pleased when I read that someone else had actually made one. I was vindicated. And I kept inventing.

Someday, I'll get to one before anyone else...  

[onboard]

Thanks, I needed that! There's nothing like "I invented the extended pentatonic scale!" and a flying lawnmower story to get a guy out of a little funk.

C'mon, a flying lawnmower? :wink:

[Alex C]

My friend just told me a week or two ago about a situation like this.  
He said when he was younger and his dad explained automobile transmissions to him, he asked, "why not use just one gear that can change its diameter [using actuators] based on the requirements of the situation at hand?" (He didn't word it quite like that, as he was ten or eleven years old.)  This way there would be a much greater number of possible gear ratios, and would be much more efficient.  His father told him that this was "not a practical or feasible idea."  
My friend tells me that just a month or two ago, a major car manufacturer introduced a new series which uses this same idea in their transmissions.

[Torchy]

When I was 17 (in my metalwork class) I had an idea for two conical shafts and a belt to male an infinitely variable automatic transmission. Built it, it worked. Got high marks for it. And then along comes SAAB .......

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

On the bright side RG, at least you wern't the first person to run a Flymo over its own power cord!
As for being late to 'discover' an electronic circuit, Darlington was the SECOND to come up wiht the '"darlington" transistor, the first person though it was "too obvious" to patent.
There is work currently going on with "genetic algorithm" circuit design, where circuitry "evolves" to try to approach the requirements. An artice in Scientific American (Feb 2003)  listed a bunch of common circuits that it has found independently, plus a couple of original ones!
I can't see a genetically evolved stopmbox, because it is too difficult to get the computer to decide which fuzz is 'best'

[Elektrojänis]

I can't see a genetically evolved stopmbox, because it is too difficult to get the computer to decide which fuzz is 'best'

How about having the computer to monitor the players brainwaves while he or she is palying through the evolving circuit? Computer should ofcource have some reference data of the brainwaves when person is in some kind of orgastic state.  

[JimRayden]

Great idea, jänis. It'll possibly come up with the original Fuzz Face, but the circuit would be hundreds of times more complex with thousands of components.

Of course, if it doesn't have a "snap to closest simplest solution" module attached.  :lol:

---------
Jimbo

[Elektrojänis]

It'll possibly come up with the original Fuzz Face, but the circuit would be hundreds of times more complex with thousands of components.

Or it would have just the same number of parts that the original has, but the par values would be very non-standard. 337.583 ohm resistor and 1.97 kohm pot. So... At least a "snap to closest E12 value" -module would be needed.

The circuit would ofcource depend on the player and his personal opinion of who is/was the best guitarist of all time.

[onboard]

I remeber that link Paul.  Even though the program is "told" what the desired function of the circuit should be - I couldn't help but wonder if it could evolve an infinitely complex design resulting in an output identical to the input

[cue Billy Preston's "Will it go 'Round in Circles?"]

[Arno van der Heijden]

When I was 17 (in my metalwork class) I had an idea for two conical shafts and a belt to male an infinitely variable automatic transmission. Built it, it worked. Got high marks for it. And then along comes SAAB .......

That concept was already used on DAF passenger cars in the fifties in the Netherlands....

[Tubebass]

R/c airplane guys have been building them for years!

[object88]

Speaking of auto transmissions, I, too, had an idea for a continuously adjustable transmission as a kid.  My idea was for a conical gear and a fixed-size gear, and the fixed gear would "shift" up and down the length of the conical gear according to need.  I didn't know much about transmissions, but I was rather pleased when my dad (who was an auto mechanic at the time) informed me that it had already been done.

As for stompboxes, I recently reinvented the Univibe.  :lol:  Well, my version isn't exactly the same, but it's close enough for marketing!