Nintendo ds -> max -> arduino

I am having more fun with Arduino. Check out the YouTube video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvaWK0QuLqQ (0:40).



"A Nintendo DS lite is running the application KaosDS 1.2. Wireless data from the values of the touchscreen are sent to a laptop via DSMI. The laptop is running Max/MSP.

The Max patch that is currently running takes the data from the DS and controls the amplitude of two sinewaves. The amplitude of one sinewave is based on the X co-ordinates and the other on the Y co-ordinates.

In addition, data is also being sent to an Arduino board that controls the brightness of two LEDs (once again X and Y)."

Here is the Max/MSP patch and the Arduino sketch:

10-bit send from arduino to max

This is my first Arduino sketch. It reads a 10-bit analog value from, say, a pot and then breaks it up into two bytes and these get sent to Max/MSP where the data controls the frequency of a sinewave. Basic stuff, i know. Below you can see the Max patch and Arduino sketch with comments.

Tomczak on the radio: downloadable content!

You can download the relatively recent story on milkcrate that aired on ABC Classic FM here. This version is not the one that aired and i believe it is closer to what Alice Keath intended.

You can download my interview with Nick Rusk of Radio Adelaide here. It is concerned with YouTube and Toriton.

Thanks to Alice and Nick for these files.

Arduino board has arrived

Arduino Board

Yesterday i ordered an Arduino NG board. I am very excited about this. It seems that there will be fun times ahead. Now i play the waiting game...

Macro milkcrate

Announcing a planned macro-length milkcrate session lasting 168 hours (seven full days - seven times the length of a standard session).

All other rules remain the same.

Venue: The environment that will be used for this session will be the town of Meningie, approx. 1 hours and 40 minutes from Adelaide.

Dates: 9 am, Friday, Dec14th until 9am, Friday, Dec 21st, 2007

Email me if would like to join in. Be prepared to stay for the entire week. If you would like to suggest different dates, let me know. If you require transport to the location, let me know.

If a week is too long for you, keep in mind that there will be a milkcrate session happening on an average of one per month for the year 2007... anyone can always join in...

Custom of the Country

I'm playing cello in music for a play put on by the Adelaide University Theatre Guild. The music was written by Alex Mitchell who also plays violin. Percussion by Aaron. The music itself is really fun - sections of it are a little Tom Wait-sy. Custom of the Country will be performed June 7 and 8 from 7pm onwards at the Little Theatre at Adelaide Uni.

Picaxe -> macbook communication...

Using time i should have been spending differently, i whipped up this morning a simple picaxe -> mac thingy. It consists of an 18X, a cheapass Honeybee PSX controller, PS2 -> USB converter and a Max patch. It should be noted that if i didn't have a cheapass, crappy, useless controller at hand then i wouldn't have done this little exercise. It's just a matter of what i have around me, that's all. Call it an effort thing.

In the picture above you can see a pot connected for testing. You could call it pseudo parallel i suppose. Since USB is serial but the actual communication between the picaxe and the psx controller is taking place in parallel, so the data at the Max patch end has to be put back together from serial to parallel.

I couldn't get all 8 bits to work - think this may either have something to do with the crappiness of this controller or with the way that PSX pads operate in general (maybe their buttons operate in a matrix and thus can't see all buttons in a column or row pressed at once or something). Nonetheless it is a step in the right direction.

Below you can see the Max patch. I have been spending a bit of time trying to get stuff working the other way (from the macbook -> picaxe) that i thought it would be fun to try to hack something up to go the other way.

Dual DTMF encoding

How retro! This morning i have been working on a dual channel DTMF encoder using Max/MSP. The main gist of things is to use 2 channels of DTMF to encode 8 bit data which can later be decoded in parallel by dedicated hardware. More about this when i put something together. Above you can see the main patch. Below you can see the subpatches. Yeah.

The 8 and 4 bit binary conversion is there only as a demonstration - it is not required for operation. The /16 and %16 objects are, so that the left and right four bit words can be extracted and sent to the individual DTMF encoders.

ACMC'07 stuff

My 'sound sculpture' for my water-controlled instrument Toriton Plus titled (Your Ego Is) The Size of Mountains has been accepted for the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2007 as well as an abstract for a paper of mine nauseatingly titled Handheld Console Comparisons: Lateral Consumer Machines as Musical Instruments. I should be having a fun time writing a paper and fixing up the ol' Toriton by June 18. ...No probs at all...

Reading 2 pots from 1 pair i/o

So, today i was sitting there and made a quick example of how to read 2 pots using one digital output and one analog input of a picaxe 08M. The idea is to use a relay and the on / off state of the digital output to change which pot's wiper is connected to the analog input. Yep.

The larger IC in between the 08M (at the back) and the relay (towards the front behind the pots) is a 8 x darlington transistor pair (ULN2803A).

I know that this seems too complex for such a thing, but it simply saves using an analog input on a chip such as the 08M (with limited i/o).

As a side-note, here are the colours and pins i am using to program the picaxes - i always seem to forget which is which and it is a waste of time. So i am writing this stuff down...

tip = 3 = ground = orange
ring = 2 = serin = red
sleeve = 1 = serout = brown

The guts of a xenyx 802...

More pics here.

RS232 scare

The thing is i thought i had blown up my serial port. I was wrong. The way to test this also allowed me to have a little play with a picaxe 08M chip. So all is now good.

Milkcrate will be on the FM radio tomorrow

I am told that a 20 - 30 minute 'feature' about milkcrate (see http://www.milkcrate.com.au) will be broadcast tomorrow (saturday 12 may) from between 10:30 pm and 12:30 am. Tune in to 103.9 FM

(However, their program does not mention anything milkcrate or tomczak related, so i am a little puzzled).

EDIT: The audio is now up on the Music Up Late website.

This Is Not Gourmet: Simple Vegetarian Food

Lauren and i are starting a blog together showing some tasty food things that we make sometimes. Stay tuned for delciousness!

URL: http://thisisnotgourmet.blogspot.com/

The guts of a u87...

More pics here.

Analog signal vs picaxed signal

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPQz1z42tEM
Length: 0:39

This is a follow-on video for the post The full eight bits....

Vectrex stuff for the win!

My package from madtronix.com eventually arrived (after circa six months). But it has been worth the wait. I received:

• Maccallan reproduction 3D imager - a very impressive piece of vectrex hardware.
  
• 3 x reproduction lightpens
  
• Vecvoxx, dev. edition
• 16 game 3D multi-cart

So far i have used the 3D imager and the lightpens with the multi-cart. Can't wait to get into the Vecvoxx.

The full eight bits...

Since I had a bit more free time, i turned the 4 and 5 bit outputs (seen in the previous post) into an 8 bit output by using more resistors. I made a video demonstrating this by having the 18X sample on one of its analog inputs an audio signal. This data then sets the pins on the output. The effect sounds like a ring mod and a bitcrusher:

"Shows an example of an 8 bit R2R network in place on the outputs of a picaxe 18X.

It's very simple. The guitar is boosted by the preamp pedal. This signal is then fed into one of the analog inputs on the picaxe 18X. This value then sets the state of the R2R "network", which is connected directly to the computer speakers and the oscilloscope. The R2R network is made up of 5% accuracy resistors, so this could cause some noise issues as well maybe.

Anyway, it sounds sort of like a ring mode and a bitcrusher effect put together. I like the sound of the harmonics."

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnQwen61-Zo
Length is 1:15

Below you can also see pics of 8 bit noise and triangle waves. Yep. This is what i do on my nights off. Really, there's no point to any of this stuff, but you know, it's actually heaps of fun...

Squares, saws and sines

I have had a headache today. To distract myself, I sorted through some stuff and found a bunch of 100 Ω, .25W, 5% resistors. So i decided to see if an R2R network would work using resistors of such poor quality (I have read somewhere that an accuracy of at least 1% at least is needed).

Hooray! It works... sort of at least. Made a sawtooth, triangle at 5 bits and a sine at 4 bits. Actually, the sinewave lookup table (hey, then this is waveform synthesis, eh!) that i used is based upon the waveform on the little sound dj homepage... scroll down on the page... ;-)

I just took some paracetamol. Should be feeling better soon, hopefully.

In the pictures below you can really see the individual voltage values as they refer to the bit depth, especially in the sinewave one. The low bit depths are really a matter of effort... i (think i) have enough resistors to use all eight outputs on the picaxe, but i just wanted see if the whole thing would work.