Aurora mixer looks and sounds lush July 11

The Aurora mixer is an open source ‘usb powered multichannel mixer’ project. In other words its a box for manipulating two audio tracks simultaneously through a laptop, similarly to mixing using decks, except there are no big bags of vinyl.

Aurora mixer

Its another well documented open source project, this time from some MIT/Virginia Tech/Yale boffins: Matt Aldrich, Mike Garbus and Maro Sciacchitano, the latter being responsible for the ‘form factor’, which I take to mean industrial design. The files for the top panel are available in Front Panel Designer format, apparently something of a standard for enclosure design – surely Ponoko could be used as an alternative for applications such as this, in which case it would be good to see some translation between this format and .eps – this would certainly make the project that little bit more open in my opinion.

Aurora mixer

Vive le difference.

The Aurora website carries a quite impressive video demonstrating its functions – a good example of passionate designers spotting a gap in the market and filling it with their own open design. The designers invite collaboration, with a careful disclaimer:

“… the intent of publishing the files is to generate interest in the community, not to make you rich. we are interested in seeing how you use aurora, feel free to post any mods in the forum.”

Images from the auroramixer’s Flickrstream

Posted in Design, Digital Fabrication, Electronics + Robotics, Open Source, Roy Shearer by Roy | Comments are off for this post

Make your own stuff using: 3D Printing, Laser Cutting, CNC Routing

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3 Responses to “Aurora mixer looks and sounds lush”

  1. Maro Says:
    July 11th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

    Thanks for putting us up. We are really happy that people are digging this project. Lots of great work on Ponoko, so it’s nice for us to be mentioned here.

    We are trying to figure out what other file types to provide. A few .eps files is something I can come up with but we are really getting hurt on bandwidth right now, so it might be a few days before I put an large cad files or artwork up.

    I should probably mention somewhere on the site that I am a mechanical engineer, otherwise everyone might think I’m just artsy ;)

  2. Roy Says:
    July 22nd, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    Sounds good, glad you’re getting a lot interest. Nobody likes an artsy mechanical engineer eh? ;)

  3. Ponoko Blog Says:
    September 5th, 2008 at 2:39 am

    [...] I’m a bit slow off the mark with this one – Make reported last week that the Aurora mixer (posted on Ponoko previously here) is now being distributed, and before I knew it the first batch had already been snapped up. The first batch was of 3 fully built mixers though, so its scarcity is unsurprising given the kind of enthusiasm there seems to be for this product. One of the first batch went out to Peter over at http://www.createdigitalmusic.com who wrote this thorough discussion on the item. [...]