Summary/tldr: here’s an alt build of the Ansible firmware that allows Kria to use an entire 256 grid. The sequencer behavior is unchanged, you just get two views on the data so you can simultaneously see two different tracks, or different pages of the same track, etc.
It looks like this:
Code:
GitHub - Dewb/ansible at kria256
Firmware image:
ansible.hex (243.9 KB)
Longer story:
White Whale and Ansible have sat next to each other in my rack for ages now, and since I use a 256 with @scanner_darkly’s WW 256 branch, and I love love love Cycles, so I had a bit of resistance to trying out alternatives that wouldn’t use the full 256 or would prevent me from using the Arc for LFOs.
Well, that line of thinking was a mistake; earlier this week I finally updated my Ansible firmware and plugged the grid into it to try out Kria, and wow, it’s fantastic. I always thought it looked like a set of very good ideas, but I massively underestimated how much I’d enjoy it.
So, in order to assuage my WW/256 withdrawl, I started thinking about the quickest, simplest route to having Kria use the entire 256. Right now I’ve settled on a two-views approach that doesn’t change anything about how the sequencer works, or add any new features, it just lets you select and show two parameter pages at once from two control rows. (Clock, config, and preset still take over the entire grid, with the bottom half blank.)
This is brand new code, but I think I’ve tested it pretty thoroughly; YMMV. Curious to see what other 256 owners think of this approach.
One change I’m considering is to move the two control rows from 8 and 16 to 8 and 9, so you have a single “control stripe” down the middle. The current arrangement looks pretty good in most cases, but having the bottom half in trigger mode looks a little odd, because the bottom trigger zone is more visually associated with the top half’s control row than the bottom control row.
It might also be handy to add an option to the bottom half of the config screen that will allow you to link either the track selection or the page selection (but not both) across the two views, for quicker parallel navigation.
(And then I need to cobble together a Cycles firmware for WW…)