TouchDuinoX(tended)

Today there are really good news to announce:
The TouchDuinoX(tended) is born.

Read the article about the XL version of the TouchDuino . The source code (arduino sketch) is availble from there.

It is now possible to build a 128 touch sensitive keyboard with one Arduino Uno and eight MCP23017s which are really cheap as one of them costs about 1 Euro. So you can built your own touch sensitive musical instruments with up to 128 inputs.

In this video you can see a proof of concept:
Does the TouchSense Arduino library work on a MCP23017 16 bit I/O expander? To give you the quick answer: Yes, it does.
Because the MCP23017 16 bit digital I/O expander runs via I2C and gives you additional 16 GPIO pins you can use max. 128 touch sensitive input pins.
There are three address pins on each of these chips that allow you to add maximal 8 of these devices to the I2C bus. It was not a trivial task to port the TouchSense library from the first project to work togehter with these chips, but today I wrote a basic library with example code for the Arduino that gives you some insight in this process.

Odroid-C1 makes music

Hi,
here you can see and listen to a little example showing the odroid and his excellent software MIDI capabilities.

My playing piano is really a nightmare but it shell demonstrate how fast the ODROID-C1 can be with 3 different MIDI devices connected to it via I2C/WiFi/USB serial connection.

Connections:

ODROID-C1 <-> Arduino UNO with 18 paperclips: USB cable
ODROID-C1 <-> 4 x MPR121 (Touch Sensors): I2C
ODROID-C1 -> USB soundcard (very cheap): plugged into one of the USB ports
ODROID-C1 <-> Android Tablet: WiFi

Software running on the ODROID-C1:

connecting the hardware to the synth
jack
a2jmidi
ttymidi (serial connection to Arduino)
multimidicast ( WiFi connection to Tablet)

Soundgenerator:
zynaddsubfx

Thanks to the creators of:
ODROID-C1
Arduino UNO
Jack & all the jack tools
a2jmidi daemon
Zynaddsubfx
ttymidi
multimidicast
MPR121 (and breakout board)

and the producers of metal paperclips, of course.

TouchDUINO touchless MIDI device

The most simple and cheapest touchless MIDI instrument ever: TouchDUINO

Hi,

today we experiment with touch sensing on Arduino UNO. We want to build a very cost efficient MIDI instrument without mouch effort on wiring complicated things on a breadboard.

You can find a reference to this article on http://libremusicproduction.com/tools/arduino

What you need for this:

– 1 Arduino UNO
– 20 Paperclips (bare metal)
– 1 Arduino Stackable Header Kit – R3 from sparkfun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11417)
or as an alternative:
– 1 unit Break Away Headers – Straight from sparkfun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/116)

If you use the alternative headers you have to solder the paperclips onto the heders which isn’t an easy task for people who just begin with soldering. But that was my solution and, as you can see in the video: It works very good.

How to do it:

Just put the stackable headers into the following pins of the Arduino UNO: 2- 13 digital inputs and A0-A5 analog inputs
Put one paperclip in each pin.

Upload this sketch to the arduino and (magically) …your done! Congrats.

IMPORTANT NOTE!!! Please be sure to have a good connection to the ground. If you touch one of the paperclips and you have a high electrical load in your body it can seriously damage your Arduino. An easy way to do this is to touch a water-tap while doing this.  The safest way is using an Anti Static Wrist Strap ESD Grounding kit . They are cheap (cheaper than a new Arduino.).  Search for it and you’ll find it.

On your computer you have to install a software that is able to read the MIDI commands send by the arduino over serial via your USB cable. It is called ttymidi. Open a shell and start it with
ttymidi -b 115200 -s /dev/ttyACM0 -v
Configure and start qjackctrl. For more details -> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToQjackCtlConnections
Open a second shell and type
a2j -e
Start your preferred MIDI sound generator. In the video I used zynaddsubfx.
In qjackctrl connect ttymidi out to zynaddsubfx midi in. Connect also zynaddsubfx to system out.

Here is a litte demo video (quick and very dirty) showing this device in action together with sooperlooper, hydrogen and zynadsubfx, recorded from ardour 4.1

and here the long version (Making of …)

Weather station Odroid-C1 and BME280 from BOSCH

Yesterday I received a small chip, the BME280 from BOSCH SensorTec   Germany. The BME280 is an integrated environmental sensor developed specifically for mobile applications and low power consumption. The unit combines individual high linearity, high accuracy sensors for pressure, humidity and temperature in an 8-pin metal-lid 2.5 x 2.5 x 0.93 mm3 LGA package, designed for low current consumption (3.6 μA @1Hz), long term stability and high EMC robustness.