#38

Oh my, that’s awesome. I was not aware. This is a niche community and it’s been a fast ramp to get caught up. It’s pretty much living the dream.

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#39

I’m revisiting the idea of a hardware adapter to convert MIDI to Monome Serial. It looks like nearly everything can be done with a Teensy++ and a USB host shield. Here’s my notes. Is this crazy?

MIDI to Monome Serial adapter

Parts

Firmware requirements

#40

Seems like it works for a foundation. I think there will be some art in the translation to and from the serialosc protocol, eh?

#41

The targets that need interpretation are the led brightness and arc led count. For the APC, there’s a 5x8 grid that has three colors and a single Delta encoder. There are also led rings with 15 steps. Excluding those it’s just a 8x10 grid.

I realize I could just buy or build a normal unit but I find this microcontroller stuff fun.

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#42

i guess you could even do hardware midi and lose the shield (at least with teensy 3 and up)

if you’re not doing hardware midi i’m actually not seeing why you would need 3.3v but maybe i’m missing something

#43

I don’t know the difference between a USB host driver for a MIDI hardware device and hardware MIDI. What do you mean?

I think the 3.3V on the Teensy is because the other guy made the shield for that voltage. It’s “arduino compatible”.

#44

uh, i’m being stupid, thought the akai thing had hardware midi but of course it’s usb only.

i mean old-school serial midi, aka 31250 baud uart with an optoisolator. teensy is a convenient way to talk to this (and its in the back of my mind because i have a number of interesting pre-usb controllers that aren’t doing anything r/n)

anyway, disregard

#45

haha, 5 pin DIN. Yeah. Noisebridge has lots of those, the Akai is not one of them. IIRC the Aleph docs recommend using a USB MIDI adapter to connect devices to it as a host :wink:

I was thinking about your avr32 implementation of USB MIDI but I found all the cool Teensy code yesterday afternoon.

#46

the Aleph docs recommend using a USB MIDI adapter to connect devices to it as a host :wink:

heh, that is quite true. however it would be equally happy to use an as-yet-nonexistent DIN-monomeserial adapter (happier, in fact.)

#47

Perhaps we can do both!

#48

@zebra it looks like you already implemented the Monome serial protocol for AVR microcontrollers

Imma try and load this onto the Teensy++ I have at the space. I think…after that it’s just about doing the MIDI table, translation functions and some glue to pass the translated bytes to the other host endpoint.

#49

that’s the host library though. for connecting monome device to arduino

#50

Ah, I see. I need the opposite. Well, the good news is I forgot I have an Arduino Due, which has USB host mode and is a 32bit AVR as you originally suggested! I got the USB MIDI driver and the MonomeHost Arduino sketch to compile and flash to the unit so I’m just waiting on a hardware adapter.

#51

This seems relevant to your interests:
http://www.fredrikolofsson.com/f0blog/?q=node/658

#52

Hi,

sorry for necro-posting but it’s the only place I’ve found when it comes to APC40 monome emulation.

I want to hook up APC40 to Norns so it can act just like a grid without routing it trough a Mac.

Can you please tell me did you managed to get APC40 working just like a monome Grid?

#53

This thread has info on midigrid lib

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#54

Thanks, I’ll look into it :slight_smile:

#55

Just an FYI, I’m working on a complete re-write of Midigrid, I’ve got lights on, but still need to sort out some buffering / refresh issues and the event handling stack. The reason I mention this is I noticed the APC40 has a weird button layout (i.e. not 8x8) and my rewrite should hopefully cater for this better than the existing code.

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#56

My god, people on this forum are really helpful (it feels like 90s internet) :smiley:

Thanks for the heads up, I’ll patiently wait for the news about your project (I’ll also give Control Surface a go).

Also - yes, APC40 has weird 8x5 (or 9x6 - depends how you’ll look at it) grid.

#57

Yeah this place rules.

I’ve been frustrated by my APC40’s weird dimensions for a while and might look into writing some APC40 specific patches for Norns grid apps… will share if that happens.

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