For about a week I was really sad. I could not get any midi data in no matter what. After rebuilding the circuit4-20 times I decied to be smart and start replacing parts. Turns out I had a bad IC chip. When I replaced the optocoupler data started flowing in like water down the Nile. But what was it?…..
I don’t know. It didn’t look like the mythical MIDI data I had heard about, instead showing up in the serial output as cryptic characters and sometimes only question marks. What to do?
Researching MIDI-In using the Arduino has brought me to this post on the Arduino Forums and this page on Tom Igoe’s site and again and again.
Over the weekend I attended the Alfred University Senior shows – a large showing of work from all graduating seniors and some elected underclassmen. There was one project that partictually caught my eye. Someone had taken an old piano and rigged it up to turn on a light for each key press. When I attended the showing, someone quite tanleted was playing the standard classical pieces. The lights that would be turned on were standard light-blub sized blubs, each in there own hand-blown glass casing (Alfred specializes in glass and ceramics) creating a really effect. The encased lights were hung from the cieling and encircled the entire front of the stage the piano was resting on.
For my project I would like to attempt sometime similar, on a much small scale. Having lights hang from some sort of fixture – maybe a bar or a rod - defused by either a sheet of sheath of sorts or encased in ping-pong balls. The lights would be in order of the keys, the black keys hanging above the white keys.
For my final project for Development in Physical Computing, I aim to create an interactive user space, combining sound and responsive visuals.A MIDI enabled keyboard will trigger certain lights depending on how the user interacts with the device, creating an engaging proess.
this is the keyboard before soldering
The above picture shows a good example of the contacts before soldering. Each of the ‘S’ type shapes was were the metal contact would be pressed down normally to compelete the ciricut and create the sound.
wires have been soldered on to each end of the contact to complete the curicut
The above pictures shows how the board looks after being soldered. A wire was soldered on each side of a respective contact to allow the curicut to be competed when the ends of the wire touch.
Using the buttons on a jacket, I am going to trigger the sounds from a keyboard to play when the buttons are pressed together. When the keyboard was fully functional, a metallic contact was pressed down to complete the circuit and play the sound. For this I am going to solder some wire to either end of the contact, a wire will be soldered to a button on each side of the jacket, so a sound will play when touched together.
Throught many hours and misfortne I have come to the concluion that using a zipper for a switch will not work for this project. I have been using this zipper as a sensor guide. As the author mentions in the article, the small gap between zipper tongs makes for difficult circuitry. The toy-keyboard is too low-powered of a device to make the jump across the zipper-head.
Next step: Buttons…
The MIDI-trigger’d pants would not be completely free of the computer, and therefore would not a truly “wearable” device. The scope of the project has now been changed, still keeping the orginal scope of a music-enabled device that you wear.
I have taken apart a toy-keyboard, and I will use that to produce sound. I want to rig a trigger using a zipper, certain notches on the zipper hit a note. in theory the zipper would go up the scale of the keyboard – two octaves.
Each Drum Trigger will perform has follows:
A piezo transducer, covered in a mouse-pad, connected to the Arduino. The Arduino, with the help of programming, outputs the data as MIDI, to be as MIDI via some music software.
After watching the video of the “drum pants” kid in class I am slightly less motivated to make my own set of drumspants. But, if I do create them, might will be better. Why and how? Two reasons: mine will not all boring and black, and mine will send out a MIDI signal, resulting in better sounding and extensible drum sounds. Using visual indicators for where the drums triggers are on the pants will make this device much more usable.