Posted a thread on in the studio
I love finding shit like this. Not like I have the money for anything nearly as cool as what this guy uses, but I can dream . Pretty fitting with Halloween being right around the corner.
Adding a musical component could be pretty interesting though, which reminds me of another weird one:
This doesn’t look like an extremely accurate oscillator, but it seems like a cool idea for a noise-box of sorts. Kind of hilarious how they just wedged the whole breadboard inside the case, too. Seems like something I’d do
I’m derailing off-topic too much (or is it re-railing?), so I guess this thread needs a reboot.
Send me your project ideas, and I will be posting related bullshit here from now on so as to not inconvenience the public . I will likely help with your project (or potentially ruin it by accident) if you upload it to Wokwi. @idmkid and @White_Noise currently have me thinking about DSP projects again, so that’s a good sign.
(Mods / admins can also merge the relevant posts if they feel so inclined and it’s not too much work. )
trying to make a groovebox on it, learning as i go and testing as i do. So far i got it to beep and control random notes, sounds cool for sure, and the oled screen shows it in real time, kind of like a squarepusher visual hah
Hell yeah! MIDI-based? If you need any help prototyping, you can always rig it up on Wokwi and send me a copy.
Just rigged this one up today. I wanted something simple that wouldn’t take up much room, so I recycled a box and shoved a SAMD board with a proto hat in there. Shows up like a MIDI device in any given DAW, just like the good lord intended. No fuss needed if I want to poke more holes and add more pots, lol. Looks like garbage, but feels like a million bucks
That looks like fun. I might have mentioned this before, but my best bad idea for a synth has no labels on the knobs and you can press a button to randomize both the settings of the synth engine and what the knobs control. This is basically 3.8% of the way to my terrible idea.
That actually sounds like a good one. Add some cryptic labels to confuse people
I don’t know where people get the motivation for really large projects (maybe I just haven’t set up the right enclosure yet, that seems to be most of the battle for me ), but I have really grandiose ideas that I’m too lazy to make. Like a tabletop MIDI chord generator that syncs to the DAW (transport and BPM), and lets you flip through chord progressions and stagger them rhythmically a little.
Debugging sounds like a massive headache (I don’t trust myself to do chords and scales), and sometimes if a module exists that does something similar, it just ruins the motivation. I need whatever the people on reddit are smoking
Wokwi is still pretty damn good for prototypes, although I haven’t delved into how well it handles (or if it even can handle) DSP with an ESP32 / STM32 or what have you
I wana ear how your sounds, mine is like a sample stretcher/granulizer so fsr. You plug raw amen data in to it and turn knobs to have fun times. I am new to this sht, have no idea how to code, but ima make it a unit and sell it hahaha. Any help is greatly appreciated.
tHE Birth of the Sample Beast 01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJrVR0jGGGs&ab_channel=ANDO
The biggest issue with Arduino is that the clock speeds aren’t really fast enough for realtime digital signal processing, but you can do all of the above with an ESP / STM (and if you’re a luxury alixpress shopper, you can get good esp clones for like $2).
(Well, that’s uno / nano at least. There probably are faster boards)
You can definitely make crude versions and prototypes on standard arduino boards though, which is still hugely beneficial. I’m curious as to how Wokwi handles simulated DSP with ESP boards though
If you ever get into coding, Renoise or Falcon scripting would be really crazy for your idea, although I admit that doing things on hardware can be way more intriguing
Alright, I stand corrected.
I got a little radio module, and the audio (as you’d imagine) just sounds a little ‘bitcrushed’ due to the missing values – not really a big deal for DIY electronics. I’ve yet to try it on an ESP32 (not sure just how compatible libraries are across platforms, but they don’t seem all that solid) so I might post up a video of my breadboard Nano spiritbox later just for fun.
(RP2040s aren’t off the table, either, it’s just a matter of finding a solid library)
Definitely considering more audio-related tasks now, though. Oscillators are always easy to pull off, but I haven’t come across a solid DAC yet
It’s not easy to really see what’s going on here, but this worked better than I expected. Totally catches ghosts, too
Klimper does this, but is a vst. You could probably rig a midi controller to its params painlessly.
Damn, that’s awesome. Seems like a functional granulator to me!
I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on in that byte array
Made a little starter setup, but Wokwi doesn’t really seem up for the task of doing DSP. Might have to bust out some hardware and port this over (I got a handful of op amps I’ve been wanting to experiment with as it is), but supposedly there are some great libraries lying around for the ESP32.
it goes and stretches a given byte or chunk of numbers which is the amen sample in raw data format. This is one way my sample beast will use samples. Now im building the sequencer, video soon. I am sick of software only, want to get some parts in my hands and make em buzz with volts.
Oh, I see. Having a static buffer like that is a good start – soon you might figure out how to record to one (provided you’ve got an ADC or something similar! I weirdly don’t, outside of SBC territory).
The software I’m working with thankfully does 44.1k, but I’m pretty dumb when it comes to scaling DSP projects for embedded. I’m thinking of trying to build something similar to Emergence in module form (basically just a quad granular buffer / recorder) and see where it goes from there – if I can make anything similar happen on a microcontroller or SBC, that would really be a solid challenge.
I’d love to see the sequencer / sampler hybrid whenever you get that up and running. Sounds exciting!
Dear diary,
This book is a godsend. Explains all of the missing details of serialing MIDI in and out that nobody has time to explicitly detail elsewhere. It also dives into the specific functionality of MIDI pins, and I’m looking forward to checking the pinout of my MIDI hat so I can go at it in a more bare-metal fashion. Where in the god dang heck has this book been?
Fuck libraries that only do half the job, it’s time to fuck shit up . Also it’s probably going to be pretty cool to have unrestricted access to all 3 ports on my hat for some very weird configurations. Further down the rabbit hole we go
@KvlT Apparently there’s now an Arduino Uno R4. Looks like it uses an ARM M4 chip and has HID support. 32-bit architecture, 48MHz clock for ~$20. This has maybe been around for awhile and I’m just now noticing it, so feel free to lol me if I’m just behind the times and everyone’s using them now.
Anyway, seems like it solves some of the friction with the older Uno boards and might be good for prototyping or one-offs. Interested to see what kind of DSP can be had with the faster processor.