#45

And this report comes from me. Anyone having trouble on Ableton and/or Mac with connection dropouts? I’m able to connect bleached (or Ableton reads bleached) and midi map controls, then mess with them for about a minute before the connection is lost. At that point, bleached still shows up as connected in Ableton preferences, but no messages are sent. If I unplug and plug back in, it sometimes picks back up where I left off.

Everything seems to work just fine on Norns (no dropouts after about 10 minutes of play). So I’m confused about what may be going on.

1 Like
#46

Thanks to @pfig I now have a Bleached PCB in my possession. Wanted to order the BOM but things are out of stock and I’m not competent enough in electronics to hunt down replacement parts. If someone is willing to help I’d be mighty glad!

Edit: Think I found everything but it’s from different suppliers. I n Sweden we pay custom fees on every package with is a real pain when ordering small chep things like this. About 10€ per package just to get it in the country. I’ll probably hold out and hope one supplier has everything in stock soon.

1 Like
#48

Yes! Thanks @Justmat had not seen your post before.
So depending where the first pot is cc numbers sent by the device are modified! This doubles up the fun.
So glad i got all my monome stuff packed and ready for some deserved holidays :slight_smile:

1 Like
#49

~~ hey bleachers ~~

just quickly added some part variants to the BOM while I was shopping. the length and number of positions doesn’t really matter for the headers, it’s pretty easy to trim them down to whatever

here’s my mouser cart. I’ve been getting sifam knobs and alpha A10K pots from thonk

when I build another pair I’ll try and check up on software issues and see if I can clean up the firmware a little. I’ve been mostly using it w/ norns no problem and didn’t notice anything fishy when I was testing in ableton

3 Likes
#50

I was wondering, is there a way to assign bleach to one of 2 norns connected Midi to cv devices and transmit sth like scaled cv or anything interesting as modulator? Would be quite cool i guess

#51

Now Mouser has everything in stock except these, are there replacements that would work?

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#52

It’s generally cheaper to get these 2.54 “breakaway” headers on Ebay or Amazon. Or this pack maybe. They’re 40 pins but are easily cut to size.

If you want to buy them from Mouser here’s a reference for a 1row 40pins 2.54 vertical through-hole header

Or you can use the “show similar” function on Mouser from the product page. When in doubt, double-check the datasheet. This one is already cut to 14 pins

1 Like
#53

i just ordered some stocked alternatives yesterday from mouser i’ll check back in with all those part numbers

2 Likes
#54

so sorry about my insecurity regarding this. but will this cover my needs in replacing the 3p and 14p headers missing above?
thank you.

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#55

here’s the 14-pin header I used -> https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Wurth-Elektronik/61301411121?qs=%2Fha2pyFaduhbwb%2FVaKS9H%2Bk48H32qxP8KGaSsI5kIAdQmjRnND08QA%3D%3D

anything with 14-positions, 1 row, & 2.54mm pitch will probably work, anything too long can be trimmed down. just added this guy to the BOM as a variant

1 Like
#56

And of I buy 3 of these I can use one to cut to the missing 3-pins?

#57

indeed + 20 char chars

1 Like
#58

I tried to convert the .dxf-file to pdf but I could not get it to work. Does anyone have a pdf-version? I want to print it and use it as a template to make the panels in wood (not laser cut). Thanks!

#59

So I’ve built my Bleached but flashing the firmware gives me a “Download error” in the “Teensy window”. Anyone with experience?

#60

bleached_top-and-bottom.pdf (793.5 KB)
here ya go

1 Like
#61

Thank you @alley_cam! On m y issue above, looks like it had to do with a USB hub. Connected the Teensy directly to my computer and it worked like a charm!

1 Like
#62

Back again. All of a sudden my bleached isn’t responding in “learning” on Norns. It works fine in Ableton and when connectiong another midi controller to Norns it learns the CC without problems. Anyone had similar issues?
Edit: It seems to be working again. Have no idea what caused this. Tried different USB cables and even the modified firmware with 2x6 controllers. If I can find what made this behaviour I’ll report back.

Edit: More issues, if someone could check their bleached it would be great. When playing with Arcalogogies with bleached attached play / pause on K2 freezes up Norns. If i reboot and disconnect bleached, do the same, it works fine. I could have made a bad job of soldering it together of course.

#63

i noticed this post on the other thread

its of course possible that there is some assembly issue. but i also took the time to check the bleached firmware:

that’s a very hot loop. the BOM specifies a teensy 3.2, which is a 96MHz part. this firmware tells it to use every single CPU cycle available to read the ADC, perform a comparison, and blast out a MIDI essage. the result is going to be an ungodly amount of USB traffic, a correspondingly enormous number of lua callbacks on norns, and also a maximally high current draw. (i do realize that it is filtering on a comparison, and further is limiting the resolution, but still - the read itself is gonna be happening something like a million times a second.)

i’d strongly recommend trying a call to delayMicroseconds() in the main loop. to determine an appropriate amount of delay, i’d first check and buffer some values of elapsedMicros to see how much time is spent doing work. (alternatively, move everything out of the main loop and into a Timer.) i wouldn’t think there would be any benefit in sending MIDI messages at more than 1khz. (even that would be pretty extreme; i’d probably go for 5ms or 10ms polling and call it a day.)

5 Likes
#64

cool thanks for that, that probably explains some dropouts i’ve been noticing as well

this was a v lazy firmware drop in from the internet - i can find some time to fix that and clean things up a little more in general

anyone more familiar with arduino/teensy stuff can feel free to take a shot at it in the mean time : )

2 Likes
#65

Thanks, I tried to include delayMicroseconds(5000) and 10000 in the loop you pointed to but the behaviour is still there. If anyone else could try this combo, bleached + Arcologies and see if they get the same freeze it would be great. That could help me figure out if it’s my hardware (bleached) or maybe Arcologies or something completely different.