We may just be ok

[wyleu]

Obviously we open on a dark grey blasted nowhere with a castle in it . . .
Wind effects are mostly sound effects played in but an undercurrent of generative stuff just to spice up the cast list.

A purposeful dull grey raven flaps by, pausing only it’s wing beat but not it’s speed to aimlessly snap at a passing beige fly disturbed by some idle dully brown cows mouching in a field…

The sandy coloured tumbleweed determinedly refuse to move even under the filtered noise of a decently intermittent wind from the North East . . .

Lord wyleu glares contemptuously about the room, briefly pausing to flash a look at the cowering crew cringing at the door…
He takes a breath primarily for effect, and stares at the scene throu’ the great arched window…
He stops, frowns, stares once more…
Why are all our animals so bland to look at…?
The crew startle as one and look to each other for conformation.

Sorry sir…

We have the most ridiculously bland animal population of any fantasy world I know of…

Can’t we get some animals, with a bit of pazzazzz…?
Oh I don’t know, a parrot or two?, a kangeroo with a jaunty neckerchief…?, even a dolphin with a go crimson go faster stripe…? You lot are meant to do implementation, I can’t get bogged down in detail …
Come on guys help me here…

He snaps round and glares at the crew at the door that cringe, in fear… Think Tom & jerry musical stings…

So what are we working on…? Has R&D come up with anything interesting or have they all been broken in Tooting…?

Well sire, we do have a new thingie…

OH what is it this time …? Not another keyboard instrument, surely… He glares contemptuously at the Behringer Motor61 sitting on it’s stand …

Well sire, we made a wooden box…

No don’t be modest, you didn’t make a wooden box, a bunch of germans interestingly named Schlagwerk made a wooden box, you simply aquired it. This is not what I pay you for…

Well it was a christmas present and hadn’t really seen too much use till you took up this drum circle thing…
So what have you done to it…?

Well this sire…

we are using the alesis trigger i/o to get implses out of it, but current investigations are showing positive results from a Microbit running makecode blocks…

And we appear to have data from the MicroBit… Investigating how hard I can push the timing loop. I’ve got MIDI out of a Microbit using ttymid But I’ve not tried integrating this with a zynth as yet except by using a desktop Pi passing the message out using qmidinet, which is part of the alesis test rig…

Fun, fun fun and it get’s it’s first outing on the 18th…

chatgpt will turn this into rust at some point to get a comparison…

[Baggypants]

It’s one of those Carhorns!

[wyleu]

Silence, silly person.
Thre are misunderstandings a foot and they need pinning down. For instance I have been using Microbits and have managed more actual investigation using blocks on screens in makecode than any degree of typing code. Quite a relevation.
MIDI is available at the Microbit level but is restricted to 127 Vol events and no MIDI in, but certainly enough to cause many happy hours of annoying people with church bells and the rather perverse Data Logger facilities…

The orientation of the crystal seem reasonably arbitrary on my piezos so placing adjacent piezo antiphase needs careful consideration. You also need to discover an effective range for each sensor.
You can do a certain amount with ring buffers but 1 Dimensional arrays only get you so far, so I will probably have to get my qwerty out to actually make this all run efficiently, but i can now bild lots of test code rigs all within a day so I get to think about what I’ve learn over night.

Big problem at the moment is getting the zynthian to recognise the MicroBit when it is behaving as a MIDI port.
I can get it to run against a MIDI terminal on a Pi and ttymidi runs successfully on a Pi as well and qmidinet can get me out from there but it’s hardly trasportable. The mod-ttymidi service would seem to be the controlling power in this regard but changing parameters in the .service file don’t produce any joy, and any attempt to fire up a new instance conflict over Jack if started manually.

The truth is I don’t understand how Linux tty terminals do their thing so it’s just cut and paste now.

I also now know a fair bit more about piezos on 3.3V analogue pins.
!.5M to 2 M seems to produce a signal more centred in the GPIO pins (0-1023) range and both endstops can be hit without any obvious damage to the Microbit. I’ve left it all running with the exciters providing a church bell every 15 or so seconds. Yes it’s rather doleful at wyleu towers at the moment for good reason.
The cross talk from exciter to piezo is noticable but easily swamped by slaps to the top of the cajon so it’s viable as an instrument in itself. The simplicity of the MicroBit’s MIDI implementation makes anything too clever rather irrelevant but I might mod the component to pass velocity which would open up experimentation onsiderably.

It certainly plays a good heartbeat using the audio recorder on loop . . .

Doubt I’m going to get any MIDI out of it tomorrow, but it will certainly play some sound effects.

[riban]

@wyleu

zynthian to recognise the MicroBit when it is behaving as a MIDI port.

Are you trying to connect the microbit to the Zynthian via USB and expecting Zynthian to recognise it as a USB MIDI port? This would require the microbit to present as a class compliant USB MIDI port which it probable doesn’t (with standard firmware). Ttymidi presents a MIDI interface to softener software but uses a non-MIDI serial transport, e.g. RS232 at 19200 baud. It requires an instance of ttyMidi at each end of the link. In Zynthian we use this to convert the onboard serial port into a MIDI port. You may be able to run another instance of ttyMidi bound to the microbit USB serial port, maybe /Dev/ttyUSB0 or similar.

[wyleu]

Pretty much yes.
Chewing my way through the various uses the Microbit makes of the USB port and removing the Data Logger which only really confused issues in this regard, we do have a clearer picture.

With my desktop Pi I can see MIDI data coming from the Microbit using
screen /dev/ttyACM0,
and it switches into debug mode

when politely asked by Button A …

And it even does decent MIDI on the desktop Pi…

So that’s all good.

However life on the zynthian is a little more complicated…

I can see the ChrisTTY port…

and I can patch it …

and it appears in the MIDI log…

But no data.

It does instantiate avarious RTmidi instances in the jack name space which on occasion this new ttyMIDI port is auto attacched to, but no MIDI data seems to make it…

[riban]

Are you manually patching it to an input on zynmidirouter?

Remember that it may get disconnected by the router logic and that patchage is buggy and sometimes stops updating so restart to be sure it is telling you the right state.

[rockinlord]

I really love to be able to understand more on how you guys solve problems with the knowledge of the Zynthian architecture. I myself did a similar project with piezo elements as trigger. The way i solved it was building an interface with an Arduino using the hellodrum library and sending midi signals over Din out… maybe its more of a primary school attempt compared, but works like a charme and the triggering is surprisingly fast and stable.
Greetings

[wyleu]

Aah shucks… !
Hellodrum looks very interesting.

Do you use it currently or has it been moved on from? It’s staggering how many of these projects never quite pin down the concept of fast and stable…

I’m keen to use the Microbit for various reasons, to do with it’s ability to run stand alone and run a dumb wifi network of it’s own, but arduino might provide for the number of piezos this device might gain, it’s all up in the air really. And I’ve always found other peoples libraries greatly improved over my efforts in this regard, so as I loop around to that aspect of the project it will get some attention.

As to what we are doing, it’s basically childish enthusiasm, with sound and not so sound engineering approaches to design. There are many contexts in a zynthian, and you only need to have watched the growth of the webconf interface over the years ( yes years) to see how much work has gone into unifying the zynthian components that sit round the jackd server that keeps it all in place.
We kick alot of ideas around at the zynthian on line meets, (which everyone is welcome to attend, just ask…) it’s the classic UK college tea room environment, but online.
@MrBroccoli has also done some mucking around like this as well and he’s well into 3.5mm cv’s and triggers so That was interesting. He talked over adjacent piezos being inverted to differentiate. So that side is just chat, but we’d talk about how one might do it.
We have a Benevolent dictator, who moves in a mysterious way, and @riban is a incredibly competent coder, and we are looking at how we can integrate all manner of devices into the zynthian fold with the minimal of disruption to the existing components.
For instance the idea of an overall MIDI clock is present but I suspect it’s an area not of us are entirely happy with but are prepared to let the idea coalesce over a period of time. But you wouldn’t believe how much conversation there has been about this and how we diverts into getting a zynthian to do things at specific astrological times. You learn a lot from such flights of fancy.
There’s also a lot of longterm interest in how to define external devices without death by yaml and context.
The sequencer, started as a dare on the Zynthian club when @riban expressed his long felt desire to write such a thing.
Much recent effort has been integrating that with the Zynthian GUI and this sort of transited into doing the audio mixer, and the frame accurate audio player was a need for sound effects in a stage performance and so on…
We just got enthusiastic.

Basically how little do we have to do to make that work…?
And then some fairly rigorous test cases.
I subject things to endless church bells or music playings to cut down on the surprises which tends to flag issues if there are any.

It’s really just playing with toys by so called adults.

[wyleu]

Yes, I’ll get rigourous.
Writing django bell code for reasons I won’t go into …

[MrBroccoli]

thats all i got for you.

[rockinlord]

@wyleu

Do you use it currently or has it been moved on from? It’s staggering how many of these projects never quite pin down the concept of fast and stable…

I am still working on the hardware. Basic idea is to have some kind of
Roland Spd style sample pad, but in the enclosure of an old bassguitar case. So a bit bigger than the Roland pads. These things are just too small for my taste. So its a start, building prototype, learning and now hopefully this weekend finishing the unit (V.1)

@wyleu

For instance the idea of an overall MIDI clock is present

I read about this issue and for my understanding it seems to be quite difficult to get the zynthian to be a midi clock follower. For me personal to be able to put the zynthian into slave Mode, would be a gamechanger in my workflow, but i have found my workaround for this problem, which works fine for me. I absolutely appreciate all the work that goes into this amazing project. Following the zynthian for 2 years now and i am looking forward to all the coming updates and ideas, while i still playing around with all the new features of the latest stable Release, which by the way really impressed me. Feels like a total new even better toy now.

[Lanfranco]

Where were these crazy geniuses when I was young and cash-poor (now there’s only the second thing left)?

[wyleu]

The current zyncajon rig…

[Lanfranco]

[wyleu]

What do you think I recorded the bats with….?

[Lanfranco]

Link please!

[wyleu]

It has appeared…

[Baggypants]

Can the cajon sound like a car-horn?

[wyleu]

Which particular car horn would you expect it to sound like?

I can assure you, there are a very wide range of them available. It’s up there with bird sounds and guns.

[Baggypants]

@wyleu

Which particular car horn would you expect it to sound like?

Oh, a 1978 Mk1 Vauxhall Cavalier.