Here's my quick first stab at a mic and preamp. Using a clip-on guitar pickup with the rubber over the piezo replaced with a hard plastic washer. Preamp based on a TL072 using Stefan Vorkoetter's preliminary preamp sketch for his watch-o-scope (WOS) project. He later refined his design quite a bit to use a TL074, but I had the most of the parts on hand for this one. I had bought the pickup previously and needed a few extra resistors, the rest consists of parts bin scores. Total cost so far about $8.
I'm using an old USB sound dongle for the input, my laptop doesn't have a dedicated mic in port. It does the job OK. I couldn't get a reliable signal previously, now I can get a good signal most of the time but TG still isn't able to find the beat sometimes. I'd still like to improve this setup with a watch holder and a case for the preamp (no Altoids tins left at the moment) with a switch, but doing it bare-bones like this is certainly possible.
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I've been comparing TG with WOS this afternoon. I much prefer using TG natively on Ubuntu Linux, but compared to WOS, TG seems very CPU intensive and my fan goes into high gear, even using the lite algorithm.
I generally like the look of TG better, but I think it would be nice to have more flexibility in what is displayed on the screen. The waveform is useful for getting the system set up, but I don't really need to see the waveform once I'm adjusting the watch timing. It definitely looks impressive, but I'd rather see a larger beat window and a way to keep track of positional timing results. I think it might also be good to build in a list of lift angles of common movements, so when changing movements you have an option to select the lift angle from a dropdown of maker/movement numbers.
Really happy to have this rig now though, it's like getting a new set of ears. I'm like Jasmine on a magic carpet ride; I'm not sure if TG is Aladdin or the carpet but I'm singing "A whole new world" while correcting beat errors and it's very romantic.
I'm using an old USB sound dongle for the input, my laptop doesn't have a dedicated mic in port. It does the job OK. I couldn't get a reliable signal previously, now I can get a good signal most of the time but TG still isn't able to find the beat sometimes. I'd still like to improve this setup with a watch holder and a case for the preamp (no Altoids tins left at the moment) with a switch, but doing it bare-bones like this is certainly possible.
I've been comparing TG with WOS this afternoon. I much prefer using TG natively on Ubuntu Linux, but compared to WOS, TG seems very CPU intensive and my fan goes into high gear, even using the lite algorithm.
I generally like the look of TG better, but I think it would be nice to have more flexibility in what is displayed on the screen. The waveform is useful for getting the system set up, but I don't really need to see the waveform once I'm adjusting the watch timing. It definitely looks impressive, but I'd rather see a larger beat window and a way to keep track of positional timing results. I think it might also be good to build in a list of lift angles of common movements, so when changing movements you have an option to select the lift angle from a dropdown of maker/movement numbers.
Really happy to have this rig now though, it's like getting a new set of ears. I'm like Jasmine on a magic carpet ride; I'm not sure if TG is Aladdin or the carpet but I'm singing "A whole new world" while correcting beat errors and it's very romantic.
