Arduino and Wiring and MIDIBOX

At the beginning, they were those 2 ARM boards.
I began my first electronic projects with them.

Those 2 boards are very similar.
You can find a little comparative tab here but it isn’t the point here.

Those boards provide:
- a processor (that thinks and calculates)
- a FTDI Chip (that converts everything in USB standard!)
- digital inputs/outputs (to read/write 0v or 5V pulses)
- analog inputs/outputs (to read from 0v to 5V pulses and to mimic analog output by Pulse Width Modulation…a nice process you can learn here)
- a full and user-friendly IDE that gives you a nice text windows to write C/C++ program and all the features to automatically include libraries, to compile the whole stuff and to upload the program directly to the board.

The whole components are soldered, ready to use!

It is a very nice stuff to learn about electronic, coding and more.. to make nice and very powerful projects.

I can provide courses about those parts too. It would be great to add that in the big list about what we could do with my future training center / hackerspace

I hesitated a lot before building the protodeck.
I wanted to use Arduino for that.
Even if I needed A LOT more inputs and outputs, by using the big tricky tip of Shift Registering, I could use them.
However, I decided to use the MIDIBOX framework for another reason.

It was more an open-source community & specialized framework reason.

MIDIBOX is more music interface oriented (by design, and by name too…)
The community evolved a lot in this direction and the whole framework is very achieved and optimized now.

The architecture is easy to understand (it is not my diagram):

There is a bootloader that is only up during 5s. It loads the MIOS. The MIOS executes your application.
- bootloader is like the PC’s BIOS
- MIOS is the Operating System
- application is the part you code

The part that interested me was the MIOS part.
Indeed, this part provided a C Wrapper (wow, man. What is this?!)
It is a “kind of” API that provides you functions you can use in your application instead of coding directly assembly (that is efficient but a pain in the … foot!)
The MIOS part was already very mature too.

So I only had to focus on my application.
This is what I did. And I succeeded (yeah!)

You can read more about:
- protodeck code : http://julienbayle.net/protodeck/#firmware
- MIDIBOX framework (wiki + Thorsten “guru” Klöse’s site)

Csound system

cSound is very amazing.

“Csound is a sound design, music synthesis and signal processing system, providing facilities for composition and performance over a wide range of platforms. It is not restricted to any style of music, having been used for many years in the creation of classical, pop, techno, ambient, experimental, and (of course) computer music, as well as music for film and television.”

Csound is free software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Documentation seems to be a little bit messy but, at least, it is provided

A nice option would be to directly embed these codes inside a kind of focused & specific device. Not a PC or a MAC, a real software modulable synthesizer…

A friend of mine work on some modular stuff.
Not with this lib, but .. sshhh .. it is a secret

Eduardo Omine’s visuals

Eduardo Omine rocks !
His visuals are amazing.

check this one : http://blog.omine.net/2008/12/26/openframeworks-audio-visualization/
it involves C++, Java OpenGL

I can really write: I LOVE TECHNOLOGY !