La Provence is a local newspaper for France south-west.
I have been contacted by Charlotte Ayache & Julien Rafano for a little interview.
They are really nice persons and the discussion was very interesting for me (and for us, I hope)
Here is the article:
my great (& tall!) friend made me a nice present these days.
he cut a lot of footages to build this nice video-clip.
THANKS TO HIM !
it is a bit more intimate than the other videos (wow! no porn, but I make strange faces)
I didn’t know that protodeck would make my face as a green alien during the shows. by the way, I’m ok.
I have 2 workshops sessions already booked:
- Marseille 8 september
- New York Manhattan 17 september
It will talk about the making of the protodeck but not only technically speaking.
I want to talk about:
- experiences about Live and why simplification doesn’t mean to reduce features but to power your framework
- why I didn’t buy a ready-to-use controller
- why the use of mouse + keyboard only is very bad
- why I use rgb leds + buttons instead of beautiful rubby gum buttons
- to know how many buttons you want is more important than how you’d wire them
- thinking more about “timing stuff” & “filtering objects” than filter,delay,reverb,resonator etc, can make you more intuitive than before
etc
I enjoyed to prepare that, and I guess I’ll enjoy to provide it.
It would be a 2hours session.
I hope you’ll be numerous here or there!
I’d love to make a protodeck with all in my hands in one day in front of interested people.
It could be done in marseille.
I’m designing a new controller, it isnt a big secret.
I’d probably have parts and I’d LOVE to have you here, with me, learning to solder, to upload codes and to leave for home with your controller under the arm !!!
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)
Here is the link
It could be a pretty nice thing to show the protodeck there ; because they are those that fight for open-source stuff.
we all have to remember: protodeck is FULL open-source!
and more, I made it with FULL open-source software:
- kicad
- GNU midibox toolchain
- GNU C
- mios Operating System
and it is fully described on that page under Creative Commons License!
I’d like to explain the very close love between proprietary & open-source worlds with the nice opened way of max for live.
If they give me a chance to do that, I’ll do my best for that
- music + live by protofuse
- video footage by videostar aka Klaas Verpoest and sequencified by CellDNA‘s Livid Instruments jitter machine
- shot by Ivan Chabanaud / selfworld with his multicam system
Some pictures taken at the last evening show in Marseille, at Apero Codelab #8.
Thanks to Magali, Thomas & others !
Thanks to LùLù & Denis &… la mia bestea bien sûr!
photography by guillaume loiseau
My main music website is: http://protofuse.net
By the way, it is not a big secret: I’m protofuse.
