BBox MIDI Drum Sequencer

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We’ve covered sequencers before, but reader [Johan] sent in his latest project that is much more minimalistic approach. Dubbed the BBox, he based his drum generator on an Arduino and an LCD display. Rather than synthesizing sound, the Arduino just outputs MIDI which is then interpreted by his Roland Juno-D. In building the device he used a favorite trick of ours to keep the interface clean. He then found an awesome banana box to use as a case. Although, the project may not be as functional as some of the others out there, it certainly has flair. Video of it in action after the break.

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Your Music In Rock Band 2

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[Peter Kirn] over at Create Digital Music takes an in depth look at the process of adding your own music to Rock Band 2. This involves using REAPER audio production software, uploading your work via the XNA Creators’ Club, and then playing the fresh track on an Xbox 360. Both REAPER and the XNA Club cost money, and the total price comes out somewhere between $100-$160. The process is now in closed beta but a wider beta is expected in September followed by a full release in October.

MIDI Controlled Fire Drums

[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

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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

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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

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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

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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]