goule

Hard to answer better than Audiocommander did ;) (there's no spam btw m8 ;D) He worked a lot on that particular subject (I mean conditionning sensors). Each sensor has two leds : one to indicate wether they're active or not, the other one tells when you're on the limit when the hand is far from the sensor (zone is 0-10, when in 11-127 the led is off). I had to write a MIDI gate to use the IR sensors (you can find the code in that forum), but I also had to use one bypass capacitor per sensor to stabilize the signal (also true for the ribbons). I agree with Michael : unless you're an electronic geek, trying to amplify and align the signal electrically is pain in the ass. The software solution is simplier and the PIC doesn't suffer at all dealing with that. I found that two joysticks on an american electronic gear site for less than a dollar each (!!!) but it was almost two years ago and I'm sorry I can't remember the url ... :( What is really nice with those joysticks is they're quite loose and you can manipulate them quite hard without effort, making very fast changes if you need to. Plus they always keep their position, even if the Arkade is vertical (but they're almost at their limit, to tell how loose thay are !) I've soldered the switch pedal connector (to use with a simple UP/DOWN pedal coming from a guitar multifx bundle) and the sustain pedal connector. I still have to connect the expression pedal + solder the components for the bankstick, but as we say in France : I'm beginning to see the end of the tunnel 8) Olivier

Sasha : I agree with you about that ribbons; at first sight they give some old-style look to the machine. For sure, a sub pannel would have been nice to hide the sides of the ribbons (btw I owned a Korg Electribe which is a great machine hehe), but I'm now in the process of finishing it and I won't make some extra drilling to the pannel. Now I'm quite accustomed to the way it looks as it is. I was thinking about making a little demonstration video to give an idea of how it works ... so as soon as it's done I'll post the link here. Thank you for your comments, Laterz, Olivier

Here is a new set of pictures I took yesterday. Everything is now connected, up and running, and I have to say it works very well with any software; I tried it with Kontakt, works like a charm; I've tried it with a few VSTis and it's also very accurate. The big plus about the ribbon controlers is that they can send note on messages so you don't even need a master keyboard to make sound design. My own personal christmas tree ;D I still have to solder and plug the BankStick + the USB connector (which I will to take power from, cause I got a flexible stage light I'd light to add). See you, Olivier

leaphion : I used to have the same project in mind; I finally bought a Mackie Control (and have to say I'm very satisfied with it). What you want is build a clone of Mackie C4 I guess ;) Well ... I trust Thorsten when he says you gotta have contacts in the music industry, when your name is "Mackie" it can help :P But the thing is : it works for sure. What about sniffing MIDI between Cubase & a Mackie Control ? Perhaps I should give it a try ::) because : - communications between VSTis & the mackie control is 100% MIDI - the mackie automatically recognizes the VSTis your song uses and gives access to all VST parameters ... Keep on searching, don't give up, there might be some reverse-ingeneering-geeking way of doing it !! :) Cheers, Goule

Wow ... :o ... speechless ;D

Thank you for that clear explanations !! ;D 8) Now it's my turn to play :D See you guyz

Okay, I've tested the function a little deeper than the last time ;) As far as I can see, I've two remarks : - You must have the entire LCD content written previously (I mean over every single location on the LCD), otherwise the chars generated with MessageStart( ) will not dissapear ??? - If you try to deal with counters & cycles to have a nice animation (lets say I want to have an animated worm running on the screen ;D (good old times)) I can't say for instance "MIOS_LCD_MessageStart(50);" for each char because it doesn't care about your counters : all the chars vanish at the same time ... (but perhaps have I done something wrong ?) What's the use of MessageStop( ) ? Thank you guys

Hey why not :D ;D but I could never understand the meaning of that function ... ::) Tried it a few times but could never get the written msg to dissapear ... ??? + what's the use of MessageStop() ? Does that code has to be in a specific location within code lines ? Thanks anyway I'll give it a try asap ! 8)

Hi all, I'd like to have some realtime messages (+ why not char animations) appear briefly on the screen, so that when they dissapear, the content that was initially displayed on the screen (overwritten by the message) gets back. So I had the idea to develop some kind of "generic" function that would do MIOS_LCD_CursorSet + MIOS_LCD_PrintCString + eventually MIOS_LCD_PrintBCD3 for instance if an int is also passed as a parameter, well you got the idea ;) In the meanwhile, this function could store a copy of what's been written on the screen (typically a screen dump), so that it can easily refresh original screen when I want to get rid properly of that realtime messages. The problem is it seems impossible to do this without the use of string functions + other C functions (like itoa to display the number). Does any of you already worked on that subject ?

Wow, amazing ! :o I can't wait to see it finished ! Goule

Thanks stryd, I appreciate the comment, especially from you ;) Here are new pictures from yesterday evening, bringing life to the baby : And now the mess ! Laterz guyz, Goule

Thanks Stryd, The back (and all that is written + logos) isn't bombed : it's been engraved + painted by the machine !!! The result is simply amazing ... as an example here is a zoom on the rear logo : It's a friend of mine who did the design of this logo (my artist name : Aerodrink) He is the best graphist I know, everything he does is simply beautiful, I'm a real fan of everything he does. His artist name is LaboStereo (http://labostereo.free.fr) If you wanna see other pictures + hidef : http://aerodrink.free.fr/Arkade Cheers everybody, Goule

Perhaps you could drop an eye on this : http://www.schaeffer-ag.de They can make front panels and they have a quite large choice of colors as far as I can remember ... Goule

Sasha : it's the light, in fact it's standard light grey. The application I have in mind is a simple one : a basic MIDI controller, except that the controllers themselves are quite unusual (infrared distance to play with your hands, joysticks, ribbons, ...). Another idea is to easily send program changes from it (caus' it's soo annoying to do it with the mouse) : with the Arkade you can do that either with a wheel (dedicated to program changes), with buttons, or even with a foot switch pedal connected on the rear panel (I'm using a -1/+1 pedal coming from the bundle of an old Behringer V-Amp2), plus you get an expression pedal input also (I'm using the MAudio one, works like a charm). To sum up the concept, I would say I wanted to maximize the number of #CC you can handle with your human capacities (2 hands busy on the joysticks = 4 CC + feet ...) Great for sound design or even live performances in my opinion ... And finally I've always wanted such a device and could never find one from any manufacturer ... so I did it myself ;) The two extra joysticks on the right come from a Playstation handle 8) they got the advantage of returning to the central X/Y position when released (+ no cost as the handle was broken). I labeled them "Player #2" on the panel, as you can for instance have your favorite buddy making sound design on another track while you play with the first pair of joysticks yourself ;) In fact even if the concept in itself is quite simple, I spent quite a lot of time integrating those unusual controllers onto the AIN module (because of electronic noise + flickering pbs). I had to find the right values for the bypass capacitors + some tricky lines of code (search for "MIDI gate" on the forums, there was an earlier post about all this). I also planned to use one of the squared buttons to make MIDI gates / freezes manually with different modes. The advantage of such buttons is they are very loose and you can be very fast with them ;) I have bought the banksticks but I still have to buy the circuit board to mount them on, cauz at the time I bought the banksticks it was not available ... so all this thing is not completely over (but I'm probaly entering the best part now ;D 8)) Cheers, Goule

Sinnsyk : yes it is ;) NorthernLightX : I'm affraid not (quite hard work as he told me, now I gotta find some kind of big present for the guy, hey he deserves it !! ) I like your nickname btw 8) There are 2 distance sensors like D-Beam, working very reactive + 2 ribbon controllers :1 horizontal below the two joysticks + 1 vertical on the extreme left (not on the pictures yet) The 2 buttons rows on the right pane come from my old non-working DX7 (power circuit had melted), as both weels do (modulation + bend, as you can see only 1 is mounted). Gotta find time to finish this up but I only got my magic pannel since few days ... I hope everything will be gathered in a week or two (busy days >:( ...) Laterz guyz !! Thanx for the comments !!

Hi guys & gals, I've finally reached a new point in the developpement of my "Arkade" controller (after several monthes of standby) based on the <soooo amazing> MBH platform, thanks to T.K. A friend of a friend of (... you know the story) recently made me the front pannel at his work. I'm quite pround of the design 8) and I have to say that he did a very good work indeed !!! Even if the box isn't closed yet, I already mounted quite a lot of the definitive stuff that will be embeded (sorry if the english expressions do not match the french ones ;)). Here are some pitcures of this toy : Voilà ! I'll post new photos when it's done ... ;D PS : if you wanna listen to my music : http://www.myspace.com/aerodrink Seeya !

Hi all, ... long time, no see ... Here is my question : After diving deeply into software samplers since years I'd like to go back to hardware and have a sampler + external multi effects setup. What I'd like to do is make associations (in fact I'd say "MIDI mappings") between the sampler presets and Fx presets, using one single program change coming from an external MIDI controller. Is it possible to do that without any PC (I could do this for instance with Midi-OX but I'd love to find a completely hardware based solution). Any guru out there ? Cheers all, Olivier

Cimo, Have you also tried the MIOS_AIN_DeadBandSet(x) function in order to reduce the jittering ? with x=7 you got values from 0 to 127, with smaller values you get more precision but more jittering, and the opposite for greater values. Give it a try if you still havn't Seeya, Goule

Wow :o :P :D !!! Very nice job, indeed. I really love the harmonization + clock synchronized idea on the top of the multi-sensor concept ... also the hands movements, very musical, almost poetic ;D I guess it's very interresting when playing live, very impressive for the public (but which planet does this guy comes from ?? ;) 8)) I'll dive into your code as soon as I've time (I'm on holidays for 2 weeks at the en of the week so I got quite a lot of things to do before leaving). Anyway your bitshifting explanations were very helpful to me, I can now use them into my code so thanks for that. Also, I have to congratulate you for the big work I suppose it was to update the sensorizer page. Sharing your work like you do honnours you (even if this expression might not be correct, I guess you understood) By my side, the 2 GP2D12 are now connecting & running + the 2 SoftPots from SpectraSymbol which I have to say work very very well ! (the only thing needed if a 10k resistor between ground and output so that output value is 0 when you release your finger). Keep up the good work, thanks again for that sharing, I guess when I'm back from holidays my only thinking will be for Midibox (my wife seems to be accustomed with that idea now ;D) Cheers, Olivier

Hey Michael ;D Yes the Kaoss Pad v3 is really beautiful. When we'll all be millionnaires we can build beautiful machines also :D just kidding ;D I'll try the SoftPots this week-end if I have the time to, I can't wait to get some FFC to test this XY pad, lying on my desk since monthes :-\ Cheers !

Yes getting a FFC is probably possible but getting a pad from spectrasymbol seems to be quite hard now :(

FFC means "Flat Flexible Cable" If you look at the pad, you'll see that there's no pin that you can solder directly. The output of the XY pad is some kind of flat cable with 4 tracks, and you absolutely need a FFC with 4 inputs to plug on the connector. One side of the connector is FFC, on the other side you have "normal" metallic pins where you can solder ... to your AIN ;) Just type FFC on google and look at the pictures.

I gotta XY pad from SS but still don't have any FFC connector to plug it to. Don't forget to get one if you ever want to use that sensor with your midibox project ;)

Hey hey this winter would be perfect ! 8) Let's keep in touch and organize this for this period (and your french is surely better than my german) The FSR stuff seems to completely fit into my device project idea, so sure I'll by one (and why not, two ;D) I'm sure it's a very valuable sensor to control, say a tremolo for instance (in a way, action could be quite close to a violonist's finger in my mind, but I gotta test) Do you know the difference between the different models (except from the finger size ;)) ? Thank you so much for the explanation about the FSR's resistor + the bitshifting thingie :D this is gold to me ! Laterrrzzz ! Thanx again, ;D

> Sorry for long post, mate! Are you kidding ? I love that such long posts ! ;) I'm very impressed by your project, lots of really good ideas (like sensors calibration, wich is cool not only as a min/max detector depending on the sensor but also for sound design, as sometimes only a subrange of a parameter is more interresting than the full range). And the experimental dimension of your project makes it really interesting (Kontakt, kissing ;D ...) > you can add rhythm to the elsewise slow sensors... I think I didn't understand exactly what you meant ... perhaps a little video would be more suggestive ;D 8) :D I'm very interrested in your Force-Resistance Sensor stuff : what's the reference/cost and where did you buy them ?? :o Were they hard to integrate them into the MBHP architecture ? I mean did you need extra components to plug them on the AIN ? For the SoftPots : I have the XY pad I'd love to exploit (but still no FFC connector to solder/plug it on the AIN), I was also sent the 20cm + 16cm + 7cm versions of their "ribbon controller" stuff (and will probably integrate at least the 1st whenever I succeed :-\) I also have a small one (4x2.5cm) which I havn't tested wet (I don't think it's a FRS but I have to give it a try anyway) My turn to describe you my project :) Today, up and running, my baby got : - 2 analog joysticks (free position), very light, right size/range, great for sound design ;D - 2 PlayStation joysticks (centered 8)) coming from an old-died-cable handle - 1 Sharp GP2D120, which is configurable either in linear or log (native) mode - 1 modulation wheel + 1 pitch bend, coming from my good old DX7s who finally died respectably (I also canibalized the "menu buttons / arrows" part of it) - 2 detended rotary wheels (program change / OS menu navigation) I added 8x 10-leds bargraphs that permanently display the position of all those (2 per axis per joystick - analog + PS2 joysticks share the same display like a "left hand / right hand" phylosophy). Today, the GP2D12 takes the display of one joystick (same value on both axis) and when you get off your hands, it displays the value of the corresponding joystick back after one second. planning to add (in the best cases :P :-\) : - one other GP2D120 + two GP2D12 (to allow the possibility of having short or long ranges for each hand) hoping it will not push the power supply too hard :-\ - a female jack 6.35 for connecting an expression pedal - the SoftPots and the XY pad 8) Still a lot of work to do as you can see, but I'll also have to make a video, or at least more recent pictures ::) Could you tell me a few words about bitshifting calculation ? Please forgive me for long reading ;D :D Goule PS : let me know if by chance you go to Paris we will shake a beer together 8)