Picaxe as controller.
Here is an old experiment I did with a PICAXE.
The picaxe is a pic chip, but with a basic bootstrap environment. It allowed you to program the chip in a very easy basic language with a serial port.
Problem was that its kinda slow. Every command was about 10x slower than doing it in C.
But again...easy and cheap. The bootstrapped chips were marginally more expensive.
I was looking into how to use the picaxe as a controller.
A variant of this would be a control knob that determines the pattern
and a clock.
I see several lunettas that use a shift register. This could approximate that with a clock and pattern.
Sequencerish thing?
Anyways, I used to the picaxe to sink or pass clock signals to a summer.
2014 - Looking above, it could be noisy and perhaps a AND or some diodes could be used to clean it up a bit. Meh
One of the issues you see in the video is that it buzzes or flickers at the threshold of the mode. This is fixed with hysteresis.
.