CUIduino, Arduino With True USB Support

January 17, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

cuiduinotop

The CREATE USB Interface (CUI) was a project that came out of UC Santa Barbara around the same time the Arduino was being developed. It has a USB port, a PIC18F4550, and a prototyping area. It was designed to enable easy interfacing with the real would through many A/D inputs and general I/O ports. It supports both OSC and MIDI-over-USB natively. The biggest difference between the CUI and the Arduino is its USB support. The Arduino uses an FTDI chip to create a serial interface to its onboard AVR. The CUI’s PIC has native support for USB. That means you can have the CUI appear to be any USB HID device you want: keyboard, mouse, game controller, etc.

The Arduino has a friendly development environment and a large following though. CUI create [Dan Overholt] decided to add an ATmega168 to his board to get the best of both worlds, the CUIduino (scroll down). It can be programmed just like any other Arduino compatible device, but the having the CUI parent means your Arduino project can behave like a native USB HID gadget.

[Thanks Peter]

Generating MIDI With Ruby

January 16, 2009 by Eliot 4 Comments

[vimeo 720761]

[Giles Bowkett] has been working on a music library for Ruby called Archaeopteryx. He describes it as a “Ruby MIDI DJing/live-coding thing“. In the video above, He’s using it to generate and then morph rhythms. The Ruby code is directly controlling the step sequencer in Reason. It’s an interesting approach to music development. The video above gives a full intro to the probability approach to generation. To really get a feel for the library, we suggest you watch his presentation from RubyFringe. It shows him playing music by editing a live block of code. Check out his Vimeo feed for many more demo videos.

[via CDM]

Multitouch Pinball Instrument

December 9, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

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

This is an interesting twist on multi touch input. [s9lucas] is using a simple multitouch system as an instrument that uses solenoids and pinballs to make music. He has taken the basic multitouch tutorial and combined it with an Arduino bell tower. The end result is possibly more fun to watch than it is to listen to, but that’s fine.

Nintendo DS OSC Support

December 6, 2008 by Eliot 22 Comments

dsmi

OpenSound Control protocol is an emerging standard for communication between musical programs. It’s meant to replace MIDI. The DSMI, DS Music Interface, team has just added support for OSC. You can now use your DS as generic OSC music controller over WiFi. OSC has TCP/IP support built in, so there is no need to run a host sever to talk to DSMI like you did when they only supported MIDI. We’ve seen OSC used in other projects like the monome. It’s also the basis for the multitouch communication protocol TUIO.

[via CDM]

MIDI Drums For Guitar Hero And Rock Band

November 30, 2008 by Eliot 18 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a497Hom8Gg&fmt=18]

Embedded above is [egyokeo]’s solution for using MIDI drums with Guitar Hero. He’s playing a DrumKAT MIDI kit. It connects to a PC running his MIDI Hero software, which handles timing and multinote combinations. The PC uses a USB ToolStick microcontroller to send commands to the console using an FPS adapter or soldered into the instrument. It’s a fairly good solution if you’re building a generic controller and need to modify the signaling.

When Rock Band was first released, modders sought to adapt their MIDI drum kits for use with the game. The easiest solution they found was Highly Liquid’s MSA-P. It’s a photorelay based MIDI decoder. You need to solder directly to the brain in the Rock Band drums. If you’re planning on modding any instrument, check the compatibility matrix first. Hopefully you’ll end up with something that can be used across multiple games.

[via Gizmodo]

Harmonic Keyboard Controller

November 29, 2008 by Eliot 4 Comments

harmonic

[aris] is continuing work on his harmonic table keyboard midi controller. Instead of the traditional linear keyboard layout, keys are laid out in a hexagonal pattern. This is the same idea as the C-Thru AXiS, which you can find a video demo of here. Along the left edge is a row of buttons to transpose the layout up or down. Switches for octave up and down along with a generic slider are also included. The final controller will include a 16×2 LCD character display. The core of the controller is MIDIBox, and he’s using the SDK to write the custom C code. Embedded below is the first test with just four buttons wired.

Continue reading “Harmonic Keyboard Controller” →

Simple MIDI Thru Box

November 24, 2008 by Eliot 2 Comments

midithru

[Aris] has quite a few MIDI devices that only have in and out ports. To chain together multiple devices, the MIDI slaves must have a “thru” port. Instead of daisy chaining, a better solution is to build a thru box to split the signal from the master. [Aris]’s thru box design uses an optocoupler on the input, which connected to 74HC14 hex inverting Schmitt trigger. The schematic shows three outputs, but there’s room for adding two more. A useful bit of kit for only a two hour job.