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Showing posts with the label arduino

Teensy MIDI looper

 I built a simple MIDI looper with the Teensy 3.2 development board  It's a simple device. It has two MIDI inputs, one serving as a THRU port, mostly for forwarding sync messages to the connected device. The other input port is for connecting the instrument. The output port binds the loop for sending and receiving notes. The first version soldered to a stripboard. The left and center MIDI connectors are the inputs connected to the Teensy (header pins visible) through  an optocoupler circuit Teensy is the perfect fit for this kind of project, mostly due to its tiny dimensions. It works with the same development setup as Arduino, and virtually all libraries that work with Arduino work with Teensy. It even includes a MIDI library, which came in handy. The code is trivial; the gist is that we read the input tempo, start and stop messages from the THRU port and merge the tempo message with incoming note data. The note data quantizes to the nearest 8th sync message. Up to date...

Bluetooth MIDInator

I got inspired by a Youtube video on making a cool MIDI controller by Switch & Lever  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ5yPdoPooU He uses scrapped/recycled parts for the controls screwed into a beautifully crafted casing. Sadly, I'm not as talented as a craftsman as the Youtuber and could not conjure up the energy to start looting up phone dials and joysticks, yet I took on the project by building up my version. I decided to make a Bluetooth MIDInator.   The Arduino board I use is a Bluno board with integrated Bluetooth  https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1175.html The controller layout is a much simpler version than the original MIDInator with 16 potentiometers and four encoders. First, I forked the repo and took a look at the code. It was understandable and readable, thus a good starting point for the project. I use a breadboard and a potentiometer to try out the MIDI communication through the serial port to a DAW with Hairless MIDI and loopMIDI, ...

Arduino air quality sensor

After some facade renovations, some of the air vents in some residents in the condominium I live in have complained about bad air quality. I have not noticed any changes but thought that it would be good to check if the air quality in my apartment is acceptable. The commercial CO2 monitors are rather expensive, so I decided to build my own with the Arduino I already own and with an inexpensive analog gas sensor MQ-135. With a few lines of code, the monitoring was set-up by getting an average reading of the air quality sensor in one-minute intervals. The Arduino sends the measurements via serial port to my computer, which then creates a CSV file of the result with a python script. https://github.com/jjylik/arduino-airquality

Turn off a PC with Arduino and an IR remote

I have the bad habit of watching or listening something from my computer before I go to sleep while already lying in bed. Often when I am on the verge of falling asleep, it is frustrating to get up and turn off the computer. Usually, I put on a timed shutdown so that when I fall asleep, the computer won't wake me up in the middle of the night. However, I wanted to have some other way which does not involve getting up from bed nor having to light up any screen (like my phone) which would interfere with the process I thought about the problem from time to time and it was earlier this year when I bumped into an Instructables  post in which  somebody had made a remote controller for his PC with Arduino as a "keyboard". I thought I would do something similar to solve the shutting down problem because as it happened, I had a spare Arduino lying around After playing around with it for a while, I found out that in my Arduino Uno was lacking HID support so it was not going to ...