Hardware on Evan King

Engram: Generative audio sampler

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I’m launching the Engram, a hardware sampler that generates new sounds in real-time using embedded generative audio models. It combines traditional sampling with voice control and audio “model bending”, giving musicians new ways to explore and create unique sounds.

Contact me or sign up as a tester to help shape Engram’s future. EDIT: The call for testers is now closed.

How do we make AI art less boring?

People have mixed feelings about AI. Everyone I talk to – from engineers to physicians to artists – agrees on one thing: AI changes their relationship with their labor. The response to this, however, varies quite a bit. This ambivalence is most apparent in creative fields, where AI boosters are selling the ability to generate whole books, movies, albums, and works of visual art from a few prompts. From an efficiency perspective, this is optimal. But art has never been about efficiency: it’s about history, the artist’s abilities and limits, and the artistic process. Many artists are responding to these efficiency promises with rightful animus and distrust. The artists, in fact, are not the customer. Their bosses are.

A private ambient summarizer device

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An ePaper display shows the most common words overheard from nearby conversations.

I wrapped up my PhD recently. It’s in “Electrical and Computer Engineering”, though it’s more descriptive to say that I spent my four years of graduate school working in “Ubiquitous Computing” or ubicomp. Ubicomp researchers aim to make technology that “fit[s] the human environment” rather than forcing humans to adapt themselves to environments dominated by obtrusive technology. Established by the late Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the early nineties, ubicomp has philosophical roots: Weiser was strongly influenced by the idea of “entanglement”, which suggests that humans are inextricably linked to (and influenced by) their surroundings.

Adding eurorack features to a tape recorder

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite pieces of music hardware is a 4-track TASCAM Porta 03 mkII tape recorder that I acquired back in ~2013. Having grown up with a DAW, I’d gotten the itch to record music with some self-imposed creative limitations, and a coworker at the time kindly gifted it to me (thanks Carol, if you’re out there). Though I’ve yet to use it for producing any full songs, it has found a home in my modular synth setup. I use it there to record, manipuate, and play back tape loops.

Self-updating pothos timelapse camera

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A daily-updated timelapse of my pothos plant.

While I’ve cared for (and killed) a variety of different houseplants over the years, pothos plants are probably my favorite. They are incredibly hardy, easy to propogate from clippings, and they grow quickly. I’ve always been curious to learn a bit more about how these plants maneuver as they grow, so I decided to set up an automated system to monitor mine.

Combining an ESP8266 equipped with a camera, some Philips Hue smart lights, and a Raspberry Pi, this system takes a picture of the plant every hour and prepares a rolling timelapse of the past week every day at midnight. A bit of code handles exposure by balancing out the smart lights in my living room and turning on an overhead light before taking the picture. Another bit of code does some color balancing, yielding a better looking photo. ~~Each day it uploads the latest timelapse to pothos.evanking.io. The timelapse above is the latest, updated automatically.~~ UPDATE: I took this down when I moved in 2023 and haven’t had a chance to put it up again. It was a fun project though, so I’m keeping it here for archival purposes.

Petri: Cellular rhythm generator for eurorack

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Eurorack is an open format for modular synthesizers—hardware-based audio devices that enable you to craft compositions (called “patches”) by routing voltage signals between different modules. Some modules produce sound, others only produce voltages that you can use to build rhythms, melodies, etc. It’s a highly-flexible way of creating music: one that rewards experimentation, and an analytical approach to composition.

Having played with (and made small code contributions to) the open-source modular synthesizer project VCV Rack, I decided sometime in 2019 that I should learn more about the “real thing”. I first started by building popular DIY modules like the Turing Machine and the Penrose and eventually graduated to designing my own module, which I call the petri. I’ve always found computational processes that model natural systems interesting, so I set out to build something with that in mind. Petri (named for Julius Richard Petri, inventor of the Petri dish) embodies that principle, using selectable cellular automata rule sets and starting populations to generate rhythmic sequences of control voltage pulses. It’s like a little ecosystem of cell life in modular form.

Reverse-engineering an RFID writer

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I ordered an RFID reader recently for an undergraduate project under the impression it would act like a keyboard emulator, sitting in a waiting state and outputting scanned tags to the keyboard buffer as they came in range. I found, however, that what I bought was actually just a reader/scanner for checking and writing new RFID tags – not for actively scanning them as a check-out station or security system might.