TAG: MIDI

Last night I was working on my sequencer project and, looking at the sensors I recently bought from SparkFun, I had this nasty idea... so i wired up the MQ-3 alcohol sensor, hooked a 200k trimmer to it just to calibrate the range of the measures, and voilà! The sequencer global shuffle can now be controlled using your breath alcohol content...

A minimal MIDI input/ouput board ready to be connected to your Arduino! The schematic is very simple, I used a single-copper-hole prototyping board to build mine, but a breadboard is also a nice alternative.
Basic MIDI output is really easy to do with Arduino, all you have to do is initialize the serial port using Serial.begin(31250), then you can send standard MIDI data using Serial.print function.
If you don't want to mess too much with low level MIDI data handling you can just use the MIDI Library developed by François Best, otherwise just read the MIDI protocol specification and start doing your experiments!

A 16 bit DAC solution for your Arduino! The schematic is very simple, it's just the DAC (Analog Devices AD420), a few capacitors and an operational amplifier used as voltage follower in order to provide some buffering to the DAC output. The DAC is not very cheap (around 15-18$!) but it allows to obtain a good resolution in order to satisfy all your accuracy needs... I've built the circuit using a smd-to-dil pcb adapter, but the DAC is also available in a breadboard-friendly PDIP package.

A couple of months ago, during Homework Festival I met a guy from Sofia who had a strange machine in his setup... he told me how cheap and funny it was, so I decided to order one on ebay. Last week I received my Gakken SX-150 and started searching around the net for hacks and mods, and I found several projects and articles describing possible ways of interfacing it with MIDI and various external sensors, but, since I was already doing some experiments with a DAC board, I decided to try it with my freshly received Gakken.

A few weeks ago I published the source code and the schematics of Synapse, an Arduino shield providing CV/gate I/O, and this is a real-world example of its usage, coupled with Arduino/Genuino 101, one of the most recent boards of the ever-growing Arduino family.