lylehaze

Just a bit more info.. I restored my flash drive to normal, then did the install manually, without using the script provided. Same result. On a guess, I them used lilo to fix the MBR on the flash drive, and I was then able to boot to it from my daughters laptop. progress! Unfortunately, I am still not able to boot to it from my PC. So for me, only one of the three x86 machines in my house can boot to a USB drive. And it's the one I'm least likely to be using. :-( Next attempt: try to make a qemu ubuntu install on my flash drive. This allows running linux from within windows, without a reboot. The instructions look simple, and it's all done from windows. I gave it a shot, but the batch file failed, "cannot find label" or some such. I opened the file with notepad, looks simple enough. I tried manually following the install. I installed kqemu, but it did not install where the script expected it to. I wasn't aware that running from a USB stick required installs to the machines HD, but this is my own machne, so I did it anyway. I was still not able to get it working, from the batch file or by manually starting it from the command line. Maybe my machine is just too old. Maybe _I_ am just too old. At least I got a new flash stick and some USB2 ports for my computer from this. Back to eagle... LyleHaze

Thanks to you all for the support. I will continue to play with it as time allows, but for the next few days I will be focusing on getting my gerber files out to the proto house. I saw a small download somewhere that would just test for bootability. I will test with that. I seem to be stuck on the qemu thing. I found a page that would set up the previous version of ubuntu on a USB stick with qemu and persistence both. If I'm going to go wandering, I might as well be moving towards something! _IF_ I spend a lot of time playing with linux, I'm bound to get better with it, and that is a good thing. But not until I get these boards out to the fab shop, and get the documents ready, and .. Well, it's always something. :-) 14 straight hours today working on my plumbing. What a pain. But at least it's done, and there are no leaks. I'd rather work with my brain. LyleHaze

nILS, I appreciate your support. One of the reasons I'm backing off a bit is so that I won't become a bother for others. My x86 machine is an old Asus A7V. depending on the USB port I used (builtin or PCI add-on) I got no response to a boot attempt, or "No Operating system found" (or something like that). My wifes laptop is an "E-Machines", but a rather good one, if a few years old. It was one of the first 64 bit laptops, and even has a real video section, without "sharing" the system ram. It is loaded with (32 bit) XP, and has no option for booting from USB at all. My daughters laptop is less than a year old, Dell, and has a boot to USB option. I tried, it reported "No OS Found" just like my Asus did. The downside is that when I'm away from my machine, I always use my wifes laptop. Since it cannot boot to USB, I would lose the portability that I was hoping for. If qemu was part of the install (if I understand correcly) I could run it inside windows without tampering with the boot options. That is a lot more "socially acceptable" when running on a borrowed machine. I have seen Ubuntu with persistence and qemu, but only for the previous version. In all I'm enthused, but confused. Break is over, back to plumbing.. Hey Wilba, hold ths pipe for me. ;-) LyleHaze

@frailn Thanks for including the link to the steps you followed. If I can find time, I may try it that way. I am still excited about doing this, but I have a few delays going on. Today is my third day of hiding in the basement pretending to be a plumber. Hope fully it will be the day I finish it. Of the three windows machines in my house, one will boot to USB, one will not, and on one I can't tell. As a result, I'm hoping to find a stick install that includes the "Hardy Heron" release, Load from USB without touching the PC drive, and the ability to run without a reboot (Qemu?). I can find install instructions for any two of those, but not yet all three. dj3nk may have a good point. This is "really cool stuff", but it's not (yet) an intuitive package. At least, not when everybody needs a slightly different configuration. With a little luck, I'll be back in 8 hours. LyleHaze

Thanks! updating in 2 parts (or more) would not work. I can _pause_ in the middle of an update while MIOS handles it's needs, but if any of the pins I'm using are shared with MIOS functions, my update will be scrambled and the volume levels will go wack.(Hmm, could be fun!) Since some folks want bigger PGA arrays, I really can't disable interrupts for the entire update, so I need to be sure that MIOS won't use my pins for anything else. Regarding motorfaders, I'm not sure I see the need. My first goal in the design was to have a mixer with no moving parts (especially pots). This means no opportunity for scratchy noise as it gets older. There are no real pots anywhere in the design of this mixer. Now, if you want to build a control surface with motorfaders, and use that to control MBMixer, then absolutely! That would work great. but why put them in the same case, when you can get the advantage of splitting them with only a MIDI cable or two in between? Keeping the CS and the audio separate is one of the advantages of having a digitally controlled mixer. It just takes a little time to get your head around the difference. Getting back to the topic, The other application I'm adding may also have delay times that might interfere with MIOS, so my need to have "private" IO that MIOS won't try to play with is probably the best way around this. I'll look for info on disabling AIN. Thanks, LyleHaze

In my MBMix application, I'm now using J10 for the PGA mixer chips, The code that drives the PGAs must disable interrupts while sending, so that MIOS can't scan J8 and J9, which share the RD3 pin, used as a shift clock (SC). As a result, I cannot support larger arrays of PGA chips, because disabling interrupts for more than 250us may cause MIOS to lose incoming MIDI. I also want to add drivers for new hardware like a Vinculum chip, and I will have to make sure that MIOS doesn't try to play with the pins I'm using. Is there any approved method for asking MIOS to ignore stuff that isn't being used? If I could "take over" J5, I would have eight I/O pins that I'm not planning for anything else, as I have no need for AIN modules. I can re-configure them as digital and have my way with them, but only if MIOS won't fight back. I could also move my MBMix hookups to J5 and then remove the IRQ_DISABLE so that larger PGA arrays can be supported. If this is already documented, please point me in the right direction. Thanks, LyleHaze

Thanks.. I will find you in chat, but not right now. After a few months of no caffeine, I drank a large Coke today. I have been wired ever since. It's now 4:30 AM, I'm going to try and get some sleep. I'll try to catch you later. I also have some plumbing to do.. Chores etc. Thankis again for all the help! LyleHaze

more to report, in the continuing saga of "an idiots guide to USB Ubuntu installation". For those who got here late, a quick refresher: There was talk of making a USB Stick that could boot straight into a ubuntu installation that might include eagle and sdcc. This way we get a portable thumb drive that can carry a complete work environment that can be used easily from any computer, without touching the computers regular disk drives. So, the brave men that know linux are debating the finer points of how to make it right, and some damn fool with zero experience shows up, looks around, says "Count Me In!!" and proceeds as if the project was already complete. Needless to say, I am finding ways to trip over every simple problem that can be found. The brave men here are trying to be helpful, but I fear I may wear their patience thin with all my stupid questions and ridiculous observations. Our story continues: I've been splitting my time today between working on this and re-installing Winders on a friends PC. (must be a good friend, I won't do that for many people) After demonstrating that I can't read even simple instructions, I was given enough help to get the installation onto my USB stick. Wow, if you follow the CLEARLY STATED instructions, it really works! My old Win98 machine has only usb 1.1, so I added a 2.0 card for faster USB access. It seems to be working well (and fast!) I went to the BIOS, to enable booting from a USB Mass Storage device. Problem. There is no option for that in my old A7V bios. There is "USB Zip" and "USB MO Drive", but no USB Mass Storage" or "USB Flash" options. Crap. I wander upstairs to use my wifes laptop. It's much younger than my old PC. After figuring out how to get into the BIOS, it seems that it doesn't support booting to USB either. Fiddlesticks! Off to try on my daughters NEW laptop, running vista. Change the boot prefs in the BIOS and viola! it tries to boot to te USB ubuntu stuck and errors with "Missing Operating System". Hey, wait a sec. I tried the USB ZIP option on my old computer, and it gave me the same error! Maybe there's hope after all. Further tests show that it gives the same error only when the drive is plugged in to the original 1.1 USB ports on my old machine. It does NOT recognize the USB2.0 card until after bootup. I see that frailn had a problem with his MBR. I wonder if that's the problem for me, too? The data is there. ON a 2G flash drive, it shows as a 716 MB flash drive, so I assume the rest of it is in other partitions that don't show under Windows. I am tired, it has been a LONG day. Maybe one of the brave men of linux will throw me a few more clues. Maybe they will get wise and ignore me. Maybe I'll format the drive back to FAT and pretend it was all a bad dream. The idea of a portable workspace is VERY appealing. the reality may not be attainable on my old computer. Time to sleep, LyleHaze

OK, I'm getting closer. Progress since yesterday: I have installed a USB 2.0 card, so I'll be able to make and use the flash drive at a reasonable speed. It's working, but I have not yet tried to boot to it. I have replaced the squeaky old CDROM with a new(er) BENQ drive. I can boot to the live CD now without the squeaking noise. That helps! I tried the "Test CD" option from the Ubuntu live CD. The disk tests fine. When I boot "live" without an install, I am still limited to 800X600 graphics. I'm not going to bother fixing this until I am on the flash drive, so I won't have to repeat the effort (VooDoo3). Actually, with my declining eyesight, I might just leave it there anyway. I'll have to see how Eagle looks at that res. FlashChat loads a few plugins.. one is nonfree, and after closing and re-opening firefox, it is a blank white screen for chat. Not usable, but I can tell SOMETHING changed.. Again, it may be not enough ram to play "Live" with the ram-loaded plugins. So, after posting this, (from ubuntu), I'm going to try loading Eagle, but I expect that's too much for a ram image. I have a new 2Gig flash drive, and I'm ready to proceed to a persistent flash drive install. Since I have to revert to windows if I want to chat, I'm hoping nIls can just E-Mail the script to me. My address is my screen name at bellsouth dot net. Thanks, LyleHaze [edit] Eagle loaded and ran great, even from "Live". But the apt-get version(4.16) was not as recent as my current windows version (4.6).I checked online, 5.1 is now available, including linux. It all looks quite promising. This is going to be cool.. I wonder.. Does ubuntu support lightscribe?

Great! Off to do some shopping. Maybe if I TOTALLY screw it up we can release another version. I could call it "FUbuntu" :-) Back in a few hours, LyleHaze

You think the CD was not reading well? Just because it sounds like a gerbil running around in an excercise wheel whenever the disk spins up? OK, ok. so my computer is getting old. ;-) Today I'll pick up a 2Gig flash drive while I'm out. When I get back, I might even swap in one of them fancy "lightscribe" drives from my daughters old computer, now gathering dust in the corner. Geeze, I thought that Linux didn't make you upgrade old computers? I feel cheated. ;-) (fade to squeaking noise in the background..) Thanks to everyone for the help. I am a true Linux newbie, but with a little help from my friends, I just might get a working install. Just to be sure, the "choice" version is the "Hardy Heron" desktop version right? There have been mentions of ubuntuStudio, xubuntu, mbuntu, and so many others I have lost count. LyleHaze

OK, more questions. If I use my Live CD to make my own persistent USBoot flash drive, using instructions from the net, can I then add more applications without too much trouble? I'm thinking SDCC and Eagle Lite for starters. Two days ago I had never even thought of it, and now I'm in such a hurry I want to do it myself. If I add a USB 2.0 PCI card, I woulder if I can boot to it? I have options to boot to USB now, but all the builtin USB ports are slow. Thanks, LyleHaze

I dl'ed the "Hardy" release yesterday, and made a Live CD to boot from. Of course it was horribly slow, but that's just the CDRom drives fault. (and it squeaks, but I can't blame that on ubuntu). It worked better than I thought. Looked good, required no geeking to get it running. I could work with this. Just a few minor problems.. I could not adjust my screen resolution above 800X600. I don't think it recognized my Voodoo3 GFX card (too old?) I'm guessing that some driver searching could probably fix this. I could not center the screen on my monitor, or even figure out where to do this. Probably related to problem 1 above. When I tried to load "FlashChat", it tried to load up nonfree software to make it work, and the load failed. Maybe because I was booted to a CDR? Finally, I waled away for an hour, and when I returned everything I tried would fail. Mouse and Windows could move, but everything else would just not work. I was not able to select the power-down button, I was not able to remove the live CD from the CDRom drive (though the other ROM drives would open) and I could not CTRL-ALT-DELETE the machine either. I had to hardware reset to get out. But these things are no too scary. Overall, I was impressed with the Ubuntu installation. I'll go looking for an old HD today that I can offer as sacrifice to the gods of Linux, and maybe a "real" installation will help me resolve some of these issues. Comments, flames, and suggestions are all welcomed, LyleHaze

Stryd: I'm sure you know this, but MPLab is not native on Linux. I assume that if it can work at all under Linux, it will need WINE or something. As far as including it, I'm going to try to switch over to the new dev setup, but I wouldn't complain if a working MPLab was available anyway. I'll know a lot better after I see how well I can work in asm on the "new" stuff. Cimo: I'd really like to see how awesome Ubuntu is. If you can show me without having to mess with the HD on my windows machine, then swing those cats! (there's a joke in there somewhere, I'm sure of it!) All: If I help out as a tester, I'm ready to go. Sometimes having a noob on the test force can find things that others might have missed. I'll also be testing on an "older" machine (800MHZ Athlon, VIA686b, 512MB ram, Voodoo3 GFX, Win98SE). I may need to get a USB 2.0 card for speed. I will gladly work from LiveCD or USBoot for testing purposes. Cool Stuff. I wish I could be more help! LyleHaze

This sounds like a great idea. There is zero chance of it becoming my main machine. I have an AmigaOne, and I'm hooked. Right now, I keep an old Win98 machine next to it for only two things: MPLab and Eagle. If I could get a linux distro that supported either of those, I would HAVE to give it a try. For my own uses, the best possible setup would be: A bootable USB stick, that is portable without touching the HD of the host machine. a full working installation of the "new" MIOS programming environment. ( Is that SDCC? I haven't even looked yet) Support for ASM as well as C for PIC work Support for EAGLE lite. GCC installed for writing little Linux apps. Driver support for USB MIDI interfaces. If I could get it all except the bootable USB drive, I could add a boot drive switch to my old 98 machine, but having it all on a thumb drive means I can work from anywhere, on any borrowed machine ( A VERY useful feature) If I have to put it all together myself, I'm willing to give it a try, but I have a lifetime total of about 10 minutes of Linux experience. Can you imagine all that on a portable USB stick? marvelous! LyleHaze [edit] even without the MIDI stuff, wouldn't Ubuntu on a bootable thumb drive be called "USBuntu"? I'll have to Google that. :-)

Hmm, it's 4:30 AM here.. What could I possibly add to this thread? If we can get a woman to handle the group buys, we could call her the "Good Buy Girl" (sorry, I couldn't resist) I have _GOT_ to cut back on the caffeine. :-) LyleHaze

Maybe one of those adapters for mounting a 3.5" drive (floppy) into a 5.25" (CDRom) drive bay. The hole in the front can be enlarged to hold a small LCD, you'll have a CDRom sized space for your MIDIBox, and it can be added to any computer case with a 5.25" external drive bay space. For MIDI I/O, I would consider a USB MIDI interface connected to an internal USB header. Not a bad idea at all. I'll have to think on that one. Have Fun, LyleHaze

The first step is to get the bootloader into the core. If you buy your PIC chips from SmashTV, this will be done already. If not, you'll need some kind of PIC programmer. Getting everything else in the core requires only MIOS studio and some kind of MIDI interface for your PC or Mac. It's not too hard at all. Really quite simple! You'll see. Have Fun, LyleHaze

Even though there have been some delays, it looks like I'll get to order my proto set of V2 MBMixer boards this week. So maybe you guys will have something to mix down all your audio sources. :-) I am VERY proud of the board designs, but I don't know how well they would hold up under the scrutiny of this thread. M00, you've handled the "constructive advice" very well. As my mixer goes, the hand-wired prototypes sound pretty darn good, and have been in 24/7 use for over a year now. If I can get fidelity out of that rats nest of wiring, I expect the carefully routed 2 sided boards with a shield flood-fill should be as quiet as an optical mouse. Time will tell, LyleHaze

M00Dawg, The best part of this is that you get real perspective on the circuit layout process. Next time you see a PCB, you'll better appreciate the choices that went into it. I never noticed circuit board layouts until I had designed a few. I never noticed the build quality of cars until I had spent some time in a few assembly plants. As far as routing options, like so many other things, neither extreme is as useful as finding some middle ground between the two. I'm ashamed of how many boards I made with full autorouting before I found out that manual interaction is allowed. I'm still learning the best ways to do it. And regardless of how it was routed, I still visually inspect every trace against my "netlist" before sending a board off. While looking at the board, with all layers displayed,use the "show" tool (an eyeball) and click on each component lead. You can visually see all connections from there. Follow the leader and you should be able to check everything. Have Fun, LyleHaze

OK, so I'll add a bit on the autorouter. I agree that it can screw things up horribly. Setting priorities properly can help that a bit. Using a bit of common sense to arrange the parts on the board is the biggest part of getting it right. If your layout is wrong, your traces will be long. So I use it to show me "what if" scenarios much faster than I can manually route anything. I rearrange parts, swap gates, whatever it takes to get the most sane autoroute I can get. Then I check every single trace to make sure it's not doing something completely stupid. On a complex board like the channel board for the MBMixer, I might spend two weeks or more on a 4 square inch board, so it's not fair to say I'm ignoring it. :-) But that is a really tight layout, and being audio, it all matters. I'm not sure I could have completed that board at that size without the autorouter, but there was a LOT of manual editing afterwards, mostly getting the ground plane to go everywhere. In the end, it's whatever works for you. :-) LyleHaze

OK, so you want proportional control. You want to control the rate of change, instead of just on/off. Expressing that in MIDI is easy, on a note-for-note basis. Every note_on and every note_off has it's own "velocity" byte, which may be anything from 0 to 127. (Actually, a note_on with a velocity of zero is considered a note-off, as Stryd pointed out earlier). In musical terms, the velocity may be mapped to volume, or to sound timbre or pitch in some more exotic cases. Velocity is controlled by how hard you hit the note. Velocity in a note-off is supposedly how hard you release the note, but it's less supported in keyboard manufacturing. In any case, the data is there for you to control or edit as you desire. So much for the easy part. the trickier part will be the electronics and valves to control your pneumatics. You are leaving typical valve ON/Valve OFF behind, and now looking for "Valve open 10%, Valve Open 65%, valve closed." It's no longer a simple digital circuit. It's also no longer a simple valve. This is all well outside of MIDI and music, but I have had some experience with such problems. One way to get variable control is to try PWM on the valve. Yeah, it will be somewhat variable, but it won't be repeatable over any time. and even under the best circumstances, you won't be controlling position, you'll be controlling pressure. So your timing will change under different loads, under different conditions, under different air pressures, or even under different phases of the moon. It will never be reliably repeatable. I've tried some high-end proportional control valves for hydraulics as well. Most of the same problems exist. EVEN IF you can monitor feedback from the valve core, it's not telling you squat about the axis position. and energy transmitted is relative to flow rate, not load. If you want this thing to work well, you have just dropped pneumatics and moved over to full electric control. even simple hobby servo motors have position feedback integrated, solving many of the problems mentioned above. Of course the feedback loop stops at the servo itself, it's not reporting true position back to the processor, so you'll have to operate on faith, and/or overbuild the motors for margin. BUT, you came here to ask about the MIDIBox, not for a class in designing automation. It sounds to me like you would benefit from a bit more study. Read all of the posts in this thread again. Carefully. Follow the links that have been provided. Look up PWM on the net and try to understand what I'm talking about. Look up "Closed Loop feedback" and study some more. You mentioned that you have a prototype that is controlled now from an old piano keyboard. Does that work well for you? If it does, you don't need proportional control. Perhaps you should start with a smaller project, instead of trying to change it over to MIDI and add proportional control at the same time. Or you could just simulate it all in a CAD system and believe that it will work that way in reality. Good Luck, LyleHaze [edit] I just read your post #12 in this thread, which stated pretty clearly that you want on/off control of 12 bits for 12 valves. When did the specification change? Your project seems to be a moving target.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is: How many people can get excited about a bitfield? Then you need to ask, and how many friends can they share their excitement with? The internet is truly making the world a global village. LyleHaze

Are there connectors on your board for other stuff? PICKit2 requires access to the PGC and PGD pins. these usually go to the LCD display port. It also needs Vdd and Vss, those go to the LCD display too. So the only pin you need that is "out of reach" is the VPP/MCLR pin. IF your project has a connector for a LCD display, that should include 4 of the 5 pins you need to connect the PICKit2. Just add loose wire with a clip to grab one end of the pullup resistor on MCLR, and you can program it through the LCD port. Unless the pullup resistor is also SMT. Have Fun, LyleHaze

I can suggest something a lot cheaper and easier.. When you design your board with the 18F452TQFP, add a six pin header for the PICKit2. If you check the documents that came with the PICKit, it should offer some pointers on how to set it up. Basically you need to make sure that whatever other things that are connected to the programming pins won't interfere with programming. Then build the board solder the PIC onto it, and when you're ready to program it, just plug the PICStart2 onto the header and shoot the bootloader in there. Total cost, a six-pin header for each board made. That's easier than trying to buy a big-bucks adapter! Have Fun, LyleHaze