Musical Arduino ideas?

[Mark Hammer]

In an effort to try and stay au courant, and have some street cred with my kids, I picked up an Arduino over the weekend. It's been 30 years since my last activity at the machine level, but it's starting to come back to me.

I was thinking of using the unit to develop a primitive drum brain for coordinating and storing trigger pulses played in real time, and driving analog drum voices. Another alternative is interesting modulation patterns for photocell control of effects. Any of you folks have other things you've attempted that worked out well and relatively problem-free? (The unit is an Uno Rev3)

[Steve Conner]

I love the crunching sound Arduinos make when you run them over with a Tektronix scope cart. It's music to my ears.

The main musical application I see them used for is control surfaces. They can easily be programmed to read whatever combination of buttons and knobs you like, and send MIDI to your sequencer (MAX/MSP, PureData, Ableton Live etc) using a MIDI shield. You can make a step sequencer in a similar way.

Many musical Tesla coils (don't ask ) use an Arduino as a rudimentary synth. The onboard timers are used to generate pulses in musical pitches, which go down an optical fibre to gate the power electronics.

"Machine level" hardly comes into it seeing as you program the things in C++.

[Mark Hammer]

Well now you got me thinking. I bought myself a used Lexicon MPX-100 a few years ago, and its a nice little unit, but so much lies beneath the surface in Sysex form. A little box or 1U rack unit that lets me work a sextet of pots controlling Sysex parameters as if they were simply more control knobs on the front panel would be lovely....and from what I've seen over the last 48hrs, quite feasible. I have myself a little 16x2 Toshiba LCD display I can use too.

[Martin Pedder]

I was considering an Arduino for a simple project. Then, I came across the Teensy 2.0 which, with Teenysduino, can use all the Arduino libraries.


Teensy USB Development Board

The Teensy has built in USB on-chip and so should lend itself rather well to MIDI projects where it can be recognised by MacOS/Windoze/Linux as a standard MIDI interface and hence require no drivers.

For development I ordered and have just received this which is basically a Teensy 1.


eBay - The UK's Online Marketplace

I have not had time to play with is yet, but when I get it working, the program will run on the Teensy 2.0.
Teensy and Teensy++ Pinouts, for C language and Arduino Software

Martin

[Greco]

Hi Mark...Dave here from GC.

Just joined this forum recently.

Cheers

[tedmich]

the ones with more PWM outputs are great for the LED music backlights like Phillips' Ambilight

http://youtu.be/nfQPleVp1O4

[Mark Hammer]

Hey Dave, Great to see you here. Enjoy!!

[Enzo]

Things come and go. Recently I keep seeing references to arduinos. The references are never explanatory, they always just refer to "them" with an assumption of understood something. I have no idea what an arduino is. I guess I will have to look it up.

[Mark Hammer]

Enzo, I cannot even begin to count the number of things I see references to here, some as abbreviations, others merely code-words, that have resulted in a raw spot on my scalp from where I was scratching.

So, to make up some lost ground, "Arduinos" are a small relatively self-contained open-source microcontroller development system, based around the Atmega328 microcontroller chip ( Arduino - Hardware ). If MAKE magazine had a mascot, I think the Arduino would be it. I am very impressed with what $30 and a USB cable can buy you these days. The whole "Arduino thing" (they are made in Italy, though "bunga bunga" must be purchased separately) has a second side, which is "wearable computing" in the form of what are referred to as "lillypads". Arduino - ArduinoBoardLilyPad LilyPad - Categories - SparkFun Electronics

The development system is an 80-meg file, available for download. In some respects, it is like an open-source version of what began with the Lego Mindstorms units. Lego was immediately popular with university engineering students and programs, and Arduino has taken up that same banner.

[Steve A.]

And I thought that Arduinos were shoes...

[Enzo]

SO maybe sorta like a latter day PIC with USB built in?

[Martin Pedder]

Yes and so easier to program as no special hardware is required. As some clever people have written lots of software modules/libraries of code to do specific things, us mere mortals should be able to string these code segments together to do something powerful without having to program from scratch.

There are libraries for reading a keyboard or operating a matrix display and even for a complete web server (eg standalone marketing displays in shops or exhibitions). You will get a taste for the sort of libraries available (free) here: Arduino - Libraries

A whole industry has sprung up making expansion boards (which for some reason seem to be called shields) to add displays, ADCs, keyboards, ethernet, wi-fi and many more. Robot builders love them. See here: Arduino Shield List

I still haven't had time to play with the Teensy clone I bought, and probably won't have for a week or two. I only want to do a simple task with it. I will let you know how hard it really is for us over 50s.

Martin

[bob p]

I looked into Arduinos and PICs for some little projects, and I decided to skip over both because they're so gutless. The memory, bandwidth, and overall utility of the Arduino is actually pretty poor by today's standards, and if you're going to jump onto a learning curve, I'm thinking that you might as well jump on a learning curve that lets you use a current state of the art product. I think the Arduinos are popular just because they're so popular, and there are lots of tutorials to follow online, not necessarily because they're capable.

I think that the Stellaris Launchpads from TI are a much better option. I just bought a dozen of the ARM-processor based LM4F120 Evaluation Kits for $5.50 a piece from Newark/Farnell.

[Mark Hammer]

Well, I picked up a Raspberry Pi during the autumn (it has a 700mhz ARM CPU), and a Pi Crust breakout board to go with it, but still have to come up to speed with respect to Linux.

[Steve Conner]

Arduino is actually a brand encompassing a whole range of little boards with different processors. Most of them are gutless 8-bit ones as Bob P. points out. The only one I've had any use out of is the Arduino Leonardo. It emulates a USB keyboard and mouse, so you can use it to make custom user interfaces.

I'm having fun with my Raspberry Pi. It is an amazing little system with the power of a netbook. It does have one Achilles heel however: the USB host controller is buggy, and struggles to handle USB 1.x and 2.0 devices simultaneously. As the onboard Ethernet is provided by a USB2.0 to Ethernet chip, this limits your options.

Most people seem to use the R-Pi as a web server or media player of some sort. I decided to use mine as a hi-fi audio player. After a lot of tweaking, I've got it to play audio up to 24 bits and 192kHz using a USB2.0 external DAC. (Most USB soundcards are USB1.1 and so will trigger the Pi's USB bugs by clashing with the onboard Ethernet chip, resulting in glitchy audio.)