stryd_one

Welcome back all :)

Something I meant to say before and for some reason, didn't.... TK mate... I admit, I have no idea if the PIC is the best, worst, or somewhere in the middle, CPU for the kind of seq I want to build... As you know, I've got a very good idea of what I want in the seq... That's because I've dreamed about such a box for years... The only thing even remotely close was the Doepfer Shaltwerk (oh man thats nice)... I realised after all these years that nobody else is going to make it for me to buy... Honestly though, without the groundwork laid out by you, without your kind efforts and selfless sharing of code and wisdom, without your vision and insight into what is required... Without MIOS, I would not be able to build this box, and I would not be able to bring my plans to fruition.... My programming skills and hardware skills especially, are simply not good enough. But all these cool things you do for us all, make it possible for guys like me to do what they thought was not possible at all. So I will keep using a PIC running MIOS, until I either give up trying (hah!) learn everything you know (aaahahahah!!!!) or DIE! ;D ;D ;D But jokes aside, TK you have given me a chance to do something I've wanted to do for years, and I really appreciate it. Thanks man 8) TK for President!!

Interesting that the values are incrementing an equal amount at each error... What happens when it gets to FF?

You made that look pretty easy :)

Nice!!! :) Thanks TK

I'm obviously far too accustomed to programming for a PC ... You're quite right Thorsten, I won't need all of the RAM available all the time, in fact the majority of the high-performance needs will be very predictable (IE reading the next step of notes to play, then the next step and so on) Writes will not need to be very high priority at all, as they will only need to be done as fast as a human can push buttons to set note data, but the reads will be fairly frequent... I think I should go into a little more detail so that I am not being confusing... I would like to work the seq so that it holds a "database" table of all the note/controller info, and then rolls through playing those notes... I guess this isn't so hard with 4 rows of 16 steps - that's 64 steps all up... But as it stands, my design carries a lot more... something more in the range of 2496 (ouch!)... If I rightly remember, most MIDI messages are 3 bytes in length (? or maybe there's only 3 bytes that will change anyway), that means 7488 bytes of data..Hey, 7.5K, actually that's not much, doesnt the PIC have 64K to play with? Maybe the banksticks won't be such a necessity? Maybe I'm drunk and posting at midnight....hehehhe The tricky part is, that I want to be able to read the table every time a MIDI clock message is received (24 times per quarter note)...at 180BPM (pretty fast) thats still only every 3.5ms or so... not too often really? You said a read only takes 100us ... :) keeping in mind that there are likely to be 2 or three core modules (or more if I need it), each possibly holding the full amount of banksticks, is this likely to be possible? Â Or am I dreaming a bit too much? ;) /edit Perhaps I should point out that these are the maximum requirements... the seq would only use this much data if it was totally full...

oh man that 4x20 looks tasty!! nice one  :) /edit OK I can't count...4x16 still looks nice heheh

HAHAHA!! ;D Nice one Ian... I'll tell her you said that if I run into her heheheheh

Both those last two posts sound like great ideas, I look forward to scoping those pic's later :) /edit I mean Pic's as in pictures, not PIC's as in PIC chips... heh

Yeh when I start making synths professionally, you know who's products I WON'T be using! Bastards... I saw their logo on a champcar race last night... For the price of that Ad they could have shipped enough PIC's to bury me alive!!! Still that 18F is pretty impressive ;D

Yo duggle, top stuff man, good on you... I'll be watching your work very closely, and I'll be learning from you, but if you need a hand, count me in... I'm working right now (well I SHOULD be! heheh) but I'll read the docs and take a look at the new bits in MIOS 1.3 (with it's new LCD driver stuff) and see if I can help you out soon... Knowing TK, he'll have his answer posted before I finish typing this hehehhe

Hah!! If TK moved any faster, he'd start leaving trails of fire and zoom back into the 17th century or something ;D Hey TK, give a MIDIBox to Vivaldi for me while you're doing the rounds ;) heheh

Gday Flownezz :D Well Flownez already knows about me, because we both live in the 'city of lights' - Perth in Western Australia. I think this was a really good idea man, I have noticed many people mentioning Australia in threads about parts lists, and as you say, one of them could easily be my next door neighbour :) I'm sure this will be happening for other countries too... So where are the rest of you from?

Heh, I think it's a bit too many buttons for that.... ;)

:)

Geez Thorsten! Even though we all joke about it, you are NOT super-human! ;) With all the work you do around here for all of us, your constant giving and giving.... to hear you apologise to us, seems.... kinda backwards! If anything, we should be apologising for bugging you with all these questions ;)

An Arpeggiator! of course! Consider it included :D Good idea man, thankyou very much for your input cjlargear! :)

Man, Thorsten is so fast, I can hardly type "Thanks Thorsten!" before I feel I need to type it all over again! ;)

Holy cow that's fast! :D Well I guess all my concerns about speed just went clearly out the window! Thanks heaps for the info TK, and once again, great work! Seriously, you do a fantastic job man, I really hope they appreciate your talent and hard work, at your paying job! I'm wishing a nice fat payrise on you right now :)

While I'm on the subject of speed...What's the deal with latency time on reads and writes from the bankstick? I guess it would just be the latency of the chip (5ms - does that seem a bit slow for ram?) plus the amount of time to call and run the MIOS Function? I'm trying to do something with the MB, but I need a lot of fast RAM... I thought the bankstick might be it, but thats a max of 256k and I might need more... And now it seems a bankstick may be too slow... :( Are there other possibilities? Thanks again

Hey guys, I know that the 18F chip can run at up to 10MIPS (I had to check that on the datsheet first heh)...I'm wondering about how much of that each of the MIOS functions will take.... How much room do we have to work with here? For example, is the MB64SEQ (or any MIOS app) using up most of that speed already, or is there lots of processing power left over? Thanks all!

hi chris :) I guess I'm trying to make the ultimate step sequencer... So if your ideas are not secrets, I'd love to hear some! Perhaps we can incorporate your ideas into this project, so that we have one project with 'everything', rather than both of us spending a great deal of time doing the same thing twice, and ending up with two seq's that are missing features .... The more ideas, the better, I say :) Cheers, stryd one

Don't forget to breathe somewhere in that busy schedule mate ;)

No worries mate...take a look at the code for the example apps and start doing some reverse engineering, and grab a few books on assembler code and most importantly I guess, the PIC's datasheets from the microchip website... While youre there grab MPLab so you've got an IDE to write the code in... And dive in! ;D

Heya :) Thanks for your words of encouragement! You sure that sequencer is based on MIOS? There isn't a MIOS sequencer yet, not one started by TK anyway... Although with MIOS being out there, there is absolutely nothing stopping someone from writing their own seq code for it, which is not based on the MB64Seq... It seems that the code for this project uses Thorsten's bootloader to enable software updates... Hard to say more than that, as they haven't made the source codes available.... As for the piano roll thing, the current design works something like what you've suggested, however it runs vertically (Sonar/Logic/Cubase style)... Basically at the moment there are 16x12 buttons, and when in the grid editor, those buttons will be 16 steps of 12 keys (one octave) with octave up/down buttons...FWIW I'd really like to make it 32 steps long but that may not be practical so there might be a thing where i split it into steps 1-16 and 17-32 or something like that). The reason for doing this vertically is to preserve the ability to alter pitch on different notes at once... I guess the hard part about a piano roll interface is setting note's start time and length. The actual note that is played, is easy to set, as the available options are limited (127 note numbers)... However the placement of that note in time, is interesting. When we use a step seq, by slicing up a bar into 16 steps, we limit the available options for note start and end times, so it gets easy, but if you want to work outside of those steps, it gets interesting because the number of times the note could start and end are limited only by the machine's clock (at worst case its a 2MHz clock so thats 2 million places to start or end a note every second hmmm... at best, it's gonna be 24 places to start or end the note, in every quarter note which passes (MIDI clock resolution)... I thought about having an LCD screen with two mousewheel style rollers, one vertical and one horizontal, which could be used to set the current position, so we'll see how that goes... I realised after thinking up this idea that a PC mouse could also be very easily modified to do the same job... What's more the mouse could also be used as an X-Y controller ;) .... A very interesting part of this is going to be what's involved in getting the piano roll info on a LCD.. I must admit that the LCD side of things is something I know very little about :( I'm strongly considering alowing control of the box by PC, and only supporting the piano roll under that interface. This is cool with me despite my hatred for PC's and their love for crashing at inconvenient moments, as if the PC crashed, due to the nature of the machine, it would just keep playing... You'd just have to reboot the PC and reattach to the seq which will still be thrashing along. the software on the PC would be very basic, and could easily be run on the cruddliest old PC with a serial port and a copy of win95. we like that, cause we're broke ;) Of course if you didn't connect a PC then the machine would still work fine, just no piano roll. well, youd get that grid thing of course, just no graphic piano roll. If you don't need pitch info then youre just repeating the same note, why not just loop it? Anyway fortunately for us, the MIDI spec doesn't allow for notes without pitch or velocity, so if the info has to be sent, I figure I might as well make it so you can edit those things, but it will work in the same fashion as fruity, where if you just push the button and turn it on, it'll set itself to velocity 100, Gate time of one step, middle C. And yes there will be accent and slide. Accent will scale the other notes down to 90% of their original velocity, this is to allow for accent on notes that are already at the maximum velocity. I realise that the slide (portamento) feature is more built into the synth itself than the seq, however i wanted a quick way to draw longer notes, so say if you have a step with a C3 note, followed by another step with a C3 note, and you put the porta/slide on the first step, then it will automatically blend the two into one C3 note, as long as 2 steps. If the notes are different pitches, then it will overlap them, so the first step will actually finish shortly after the second begins. This should get the portamento happening on your external synths... Anyway, once again the existing MB64Seq already fills your requirements. The buttons on the Seq can be used to mute on/off the notes, and the knobs can be used to make an accent I think this thread is about the most I've written about this thing in one go heh! I'm starting to scare myself off, seeing all the features listed out ;)