midi

377 Articles

MIDI Controlled Fire Drums

July 9, 2009 by 18 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp74fO2a38]

Using an MSA-T MIDI Decoder from Highly Liquid, [Rob Darman] was able to take the MIDI output of his Roland V-Drums and use that output to control fire shooting cannons, forming a setup that he calls fire drums. As seen in the video above, the response time between the V-Drums and the fire drums is pretty impressive. While this is by far one of the coolest things that we’ve seen controlled by MIDI, we’re naturally thinking about taking this to the next level; MIDI-controlled fireworks, anyone?

You may remember the MSA decoder devices from people wiring up MIDI drums to Rock Band.

How-to: The Bus Pirate V2 With USB

June 25, 2009 by 32 Comments

buspiratev2goii450

Update, Saturday July 4th, 2009: All preorders are closed.

The Bus Pirate is a universal serial interface tool, we use it to test new chips without writing any code. It currently supports most serial protocols, including 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, JTAG, asynchronous serial, MIDI, and more. We added some other features we frequently need, like pulse-width modulation, frequency measurement, voltage measurement, bus sniffers, pull-up resistors, and switchable 3.3volt and 5volt power supplies.

The new v2 family adds USB power and connectivity to the best Bus Pirate design yet. We also reduced the part count and cost wherever possible. If you want to get your hands on some Bus Pirate USB goodness, Seeed Studio has assembled hardware for $30 (including worldwide shipping).

Read about the new design after the break.

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MIDI Sequencer/controller

June 13, 2009 by 12 Comments

lenonluks

Reader, [Lennon Luks] made a really slick  MIDI sequencer/controller for his senior design project while studying at Western Carolina University. It has a grid of 64 LED buttons, 8 knobs, and a display with navigation buttons that allow him to sequence tracks with or without a computer. The controller is based off an ATmega644 and is programmed in C. [Lennon] clearly explains the inner workings of the project in detail on his website and has included a good number of pictures. [Lennon] made a nice video of the project which can be seen after the jump.

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Irregular Incurve Robotic Instrument

May 12, 2009 by 13 Comments

irregular_incurve

The Irregular Incurve is a robotic instrument built by [Xiaoyang Feng] as part of his ITP thesis work. It’s a MIDI instrument with an array of 12 strung bows mounted to a curved shower rod. The end of each bow has a tuning key. The strings are each picked using independently mounted arms. One servo controls the downward motion of the pick while the other controls the rotation of the shaft. A damper is also attached to each arm. The string vibrations are transferred to a spruce soundbox under the bridge. Below you can see a video of Gizmodo playing with it at the ITP show. Check out [Xiaoyang]’s Flickr set for images of the build process plus some early videos of the mechanism.

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AXiS-49 Teardown

March 31, 2009 by 5 Comments

cthruteardown

We touched on harmonic table MIDI controllers when [aris] was building one. [Ken Rushton] has one of C-Thru’s commercial keypads, the AXiS-49, and disassembled the device to show how it works. A PIC18F2450 microcontroller provides the USB interface and is connected to a dsPIC33FJ128GP310 digital signal controller which decodes the keypresses. The membrane buttons are made with two concentric graphite disks that touch gold contacts. The microcontroller measures the time between the two points contacting to determine the button velocity. monome button clones also use circular contact pads, but cannot calculate velocity because they only have one element.

[via Matrixsynth]

Generating G-code With Common Lisp

February 1, 2009 by 10 Comments

gcode

Ruin & Wesen are a two person shop creating specialized music gear. As part of their recent MIDI Command development, they got into case manufacturing. They purchased a mini CNC mill to cut the aluminum cases. Unhappy with the software options provide [Wesen] decided to write his own G-code generator. G-code is part of the numerical control used to command CNC machines. He implemented his interpreter using the language he’s most familiar with: Common Lisp (not surprising if you notice the website’s backend). The post covers the design philosophy used and some of the problems that came up. We look forward to future releases since the interpreter can generate milling code using processing.org sketches and cut PCBs directly from Eagle.

You may remember Ruin & Wesen from when they shared their Eagle layout videos.

[Thanks fbz]

Passive MIDI Foot Switch

January 20, 2009 by 12 Comments

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[Matt] was looking into some software that allows him to use his audio card as a means to control analog audio devices. After seeing how it worked, he got an idea to try to do the opposite.  He is sending a signal into his audio input, and piping it to a pice of MIDI software. The input he has chose is a foot switch. To create the signal, he simply needed to supply voltage while the switch was depressed. You can see above that he used a battery and a simple contact switch to send the signal. He then piped it to a virtual MIDI port using Maple Virtual MIDI Cable. Unfortunately, this isn’t suitable for knobs, but that may be next on his list.