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

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.

Seriously, is anyone marketing tools like this?

Some time ago, I picked up an LCD photo frame that was on clearance, however it’s screen quality turned out to be quite unsuitable for actually showing photos. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but I thought it would be a shame to waste the thing, so I decided to turn it into a ridiculous clock.

The idea is pretty straightforward, I just built a circuit to hit the ‘next’ button every minute, then generated 720 photos to store on it, one for each minute in a 12-hour cycle. I chose to write out the time in words, however really anything could be used and displayed. Build instructions after the break. Read more…

I carved a pumpkin on Friday night during Fall Festivities Night at Hack Pittsburgh, what do you think?

For reference, it’s about 1.5 inches in diameter.

Here you can see how I built a drill press, and consider the vacant spaces on the top of my head. It wasn’t very complicated, so the video is very short…

This was really just a quick test. I learned that I need to put the D700 in manual focus mode when using it’s time lapse function, and also that a period of 7 seconds is too slow to capture this sort of activity. I still fear for my shutter life when abusing the camera this way, so I will probably stick to my Powershot S3 and CHDK firmware for lengthly time lapse videos.

This is a little prototype game that I made to answer the question: What if tetris was played on a hill?

Tetris theme is as performed by me on a synth. You can download the game here (requires python and pygame), or view the hackish source code after the break.
Read more…

This system is designed to impose a sense of immediacy upon critical tasks that have strong, real-life consequences but unfortunately lack direct visual feedback until it is too late (ie, paying bills on time, submitting applications, etc)