C i b o M a h t o . c o m

To escape the plastic world for a bit this weekend, I headed out to the Phipps Conservatory for some organic scenery. Though I was a big fan of the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, I’ve only been to Phipps a few times since I moved to Pittsburgh. The desert room here saddens me. Though it is laid out well, I miss the smell of creosote bush, and have to fight the urge to put on my hiking boots and head west. Turns out I miss Arizona!

Anyway, this is a pleasant place overall, wonderful smells, colors, and sounds (even the pre-recorded bird calls- either a nice touch or an extreme annoyance). I took a couple of photos, but mostly just sat and observed. The sheer variety of shapes and colors produced by our floral friends can be quite overwhelming.

I did pick up a membership, so if’n you ever want to make a visit there, let me know.

Collin sent me a pre-release sample of his MidiVox kit to try out, so I dutifully soldered it up, and then proceeded to have some fun with . It’s a cool little add-on shield for the Arduino, consisting of a MIDI input jack, DAC and audio output jack, allowing the Arduino to act as a MIDI synthesizer. The board and components are beautiful, with cool curvy traces (which I suggest you consider from an aesthetic standpoint, not an engineering one) and solid connectors, and I had little trouble assembling it. The kit included 5-banded resistors, which I didn’t remember how to decode, (it turns out they are higher precision then their 4-banded cousins), but a multimeter did the job just fine.

Once it was all put together, I grabbed the pre-release version of the software, and after working through some issues to get it to compile on my Linux system (filename case sensitivity, we make everything difficult!), and uncovering (and fixing) a bug in the Arduino environment that prevented a supporting library from compiling, the sketch uploaded fine. I plugged in a MIDI patch cable and was busting out melodies from my MIDI keyboard in no time.

Then, OCD mode kicked in, and strange things were made to happen… Becasue my keyboard only has one adjustment knob, I wasn’t able to use it to tweak all of the synth parameters, so I wrote a PD sketch to expose all of the knobs:

(get the sketch)

Then, I decided that I really wanted to use a sequencer to feed the MidiVox, so I fired up Seq24 and made some patterns, throwing in a drum track generated by QSynth. This was all working great using the MIDI out through my keyboard, but I realized it would be much more convenient if I could control it directly through the USB connection. Well, Steven Hobley recently made a program to achieve this in Windows, but I couldn’t find anything like it for Linux. Instead, I hacked up a copy of ttymidi to work backwards. It’s a pretty incomplete implementation of a serial->MIDI bridge (ideally, it would support bidirectional messages of all kinds, not just note on/note off/control), but it seems to do the job. If you are interested, the hacked-up mess is here, and be sure to set your Arduino to 38400 baud.

At the end of it all, I was able to relax on my couch and control the MidiVox directly from my laptop, without a MIDI cable in sight… quite a bit of fun! If I get inspired sometime soon, I’ll try to clean up the hack job I did to ttymidi, and release it properly.

Extended the controller to handle all three drive axis, so now we can draw some things. Here is what came out:

Props to Matt S. for gently reminding me that this doesn’t require a super complex system, and that some tape and open loop controls are probably good enough .

Project code is now on github!

I’ve been on a bit of a baking kick lately. I’d been making a country loaf recipe, but decided to try out a French bread recipe this time. I like the taste of it, however purists might argue that it isn’t quite right stylistically- the crust is crunchy but not exactly hard, and the insides are warm and i think a bit denser than might be expected. Which is actually my favorite texture for bread, so I’m not complaining .

Following this recipe.

UPDATE: The Documentation Lighting event is canceled due to the impending inclement weather. Stay tuned, it will be rescheduled!

Want to present your projects online in the best light? Frustrated with the way your documentation photos come out? Need a warm place to be on a Friday night? Then you should definitely come out to Hack Pittsburgh this Friday for our Documentation Lighting workshop. Bonnie Bogovitch and I will cover the basics of documentation photography, using the equipment you already have. After we yammer on for a bit, we’ll get down to the business of taking photos, so be sure to bring your camera and something cool that you want to take a picture of. It’s guaranteed* to be a good time!

Documentation Lighting Workshop
Friday, Feb 5th, 2010, 7pm – 9pm
Hack Pittsburgh
1936 5th Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Cost: Freeeeeeeee

*There is no such guarantee, It turns out I’m a terrible liar!

We spent the greater part of the day building out a wall to section off the workshop area at Hack Pittsburgh. This is how it went!

Matt, Andy and I built our Atari Punk Console kits tonight, so that we are ready for Synth Night 2 at Hack Pittsburgh. Hope to see you there! Video encoding deets after the break.
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