#74

If you enable too many pull-ups, then your effective pull-up resistance goes down. I2C is active low. When your bus is pulled low, the pull-ups create a voltage divider keeping your “low” higher than zero. So too little resistance will make your “low” values perhaps too high for reliable triggering of logic thresholds. Not dangerous, just bad comms.

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#75

As a total luddite… I beg to differ. I find the Teletype studies rather confusing, even impenetrable. I can work through them and make them work, but by the end I’m so confused I don’t really feel that I’ve learned anything.

Don’t get me wrong though, I really love Ansible/Kria, I got a Norns early on, have had no luck investing time into learning to program, but have loads of fun and make use of others hard work on wonderful scripts. I ordered Crow mostly to integrate Norns sequencing with my modular. Again, I will probably ride on other people’s work for quite some time. I got a TT this summer though, and have zero luck. The idea that crow might be a bit of TT lite is interesting, but probably something I also won’t crack.

I do realize that my work/family/synthing life doesn’t lend itself to learning coding right now, when I get an 30-60 minutes a day tops with my modular, it’s really hard to dive in to the coding and feel productive when I could just be making bleep bloops instead.

I haven’t pawned off my TT yet, but those studies are still pretty obtuse. I feel like literally going through and just adding dumbed down definitions to things would probably improve the clarity factor. I’m not upset about it, maybe my capacity for learning a new language is zero, and that’s fine.

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#76

I was going to PR the wiki and let someone correct me there, but TIL you can’t PR a wiki on Github :frowning: .

Regarding pull-ups:

If you accidentally enable crow’s pull-ups, you can disable them through a variety of methods:

This line leads me to believe that when you enable pull-ups, (say in norns), you only have to do it once, not each time the script runs? If so, my change to the faq would be “Once crows pull-ups are enabled, they will remain that way until you disable them”.

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#77

apologies for the blocker! we’ll be merging these bits into the main docs, which can be PR’d. thank you for the energy and help!!

i think this will rely largely on the conventions to which we collectively arrive — today, while adding crow support to less concepts, i found it best to assume a user would want to enable pull-ups on demand vs having me assume they wanted the pull-ups enabled by default. so, when you load less concepts your pull-ups will be disabled in the init() and you can choose to enable them in params. this decision point is an indicator of the myriad users who might approach the integration — those who would look at the code and comment out the enable/disable and those who would want a UI element for it.

either way, excellent clarification suggestion!

#78

definitely having the same experience with teletype and the studies. it feels like one of those things where i don’t know enough to know how to make it easier/ more digestible, but by the time I know enough I might no longer see the need XP

every time I do the studies I get some new tidbit out of it, but the fundamental theoretical structure/ way of working is so foreign to me it makes it very slow going. I have wondered if it would be better for me to go off and learn some basic coding first, or if I’d started with norns and learned some lua since there’s more resources for that (I assume) and then came to teletype with some knowledge of that sort of way of working. In any case I plan to continue to push the telly up the hill even if it takes a while because there is so much potential…

and if I eventually learn to code down the road because of this journey, who knows I might accidentally end up with a marketable skill. if I’m not careful next thing I know I might have a job :weary:

i think theres a gatekeepy/inaccessible aspect that comes with the extreme open-endedness of monomes products thats similar to the inaccessibility of modular in general. The monome device is the quintessential example of this – the potential is so unlimited that it’s impossible for a layperson to know what’s going on. Even when you know someones using it to trigger samples from a computer, the button pressing is… indecipherable. Maybe what is needed is more of a user-made “idiots guide” type video series, the way there are so many for modular synthesis. There are a few good videos like this about specific things, but you run into a huge issue of how expansive the potential is and what a video series would even encompass. So I’m not sure my suggestion solves the problem, but more video tutorials couldnt hurt :stuck_out_tongue:

I do appreciate that monome and this community do try to make this things as accessible as possible, and the fact we’re having this discussion is very cool and nice :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#79

@renegog It’s interesting that you compare it to modular in general. it makes me wonder: is it possible that learning a new skillI outside one’s expertise is just hard and takes time?

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#81

Ha… I thought the same thing, only more positively.

I don’t think comparing it to modular is accurate. You can just plug cables in and see how things work and make sounds. You can’t mash keys on a keyboard and get something out of a TT.

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#82

This discussion has me thinking a lot of interesting things…

I hope to post some kind of modest proposal soon, based on the insight that this is fundamentally a learning community… That opens various challenges and opportunities…

I’m really interested in talking with others in teaching/academic mindsets, including you of course! :sunglasses:

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#84

definitely! that’s part of what i find exciting about it (modular, and something like teletype for example). I find posing it as a question like that is slightly condescending (of course learning new things is hard and takes time), which I think is entirely the point: it’s not that it has to be easier, but that it should be accessible. And, as I said, I believe monome does try to make things as accessible as possible and having this community does a huge part in filling in gaps, and creates a space for this type of discussion.

The defensiveness about this the last few days is a bit bizarre to me, but it’s probably more to do with the impersonal mode of communication than anything else, to be fair.

1 Like
#86

the idea of a “paying customer” being privileged is entirely counter to my argument :stuck_out_tongue: but what you’re saying definitely speaks to a misunderstanding that the desire is to have something the same but easier, as if there is no knowledge on our part that it will require work and effort.

Generally speaking, considering how esoteric and technical things get on here, I have always had the feeling that there are people here who would walk me through any difficulties or questions I had. The most welcoming of gate-keepers! (this is a joke, they’re not the gatekeepers I know). This is why the last few days feels weird, but it of course hasn’t all been like that – I don’t mean to mischaracterize the conversation.

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#87

if your modest proposal is to prevent the children of non-programmers from being a burden to their parents by eating them, I’m all in!

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#90

There seems to be so many threads and a spectrum of viewpoints so it’s hard to respond to single thread without inadvertently appearing to step on someone else’s viewpoint.

That being said, I totally agree that the documentation for Teletype could be improved. I’ve been programming professionally for a while and Teletype has been one of the harder environments to grasp. It feels a bit like learning to read a foreign language by reading a book in the foreign language while flipping through a dictionary to figure out what everything means. If I hadn’t had an easier time of learning other foreign languages I would think “maybe it’s just me.”

Other programming languages have multiple resources for learning. Teletype only has the studies, this forum, and documentation. It doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for people with different learning styles.

When I got started with modular the thing that really helped was having so many video tutorials and separate forum threads on single aspects of modular. I’ll try to document my own learning journey and share that out so that hopefully having an additional resource can help others.

In response to some of the other replies, the “Learn it or leave it” gatekeeping is not a good look. The “Fuck that, I’m a paying customer” attitude on the opposite end of the spectrum is… well you’re being “that guy” Don’t be “that guy”

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#91

What are you looking for that isn’t there and is present for other modes of learning?

#92

An excerpt from a message I sent to Alanza this morning:

Newbs are technically customers but that is not a particularly helpful role concept…

More useful to be students or apprentices or Starfleet Academy incoming class…

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#93

Whichever level you are at, learning is not easy and struggling is normal. It doesn’t make you weird. Your brain has to make new connections that aren’t there.

When I learned guitar and piano, I had to ask a lot of questions in weekly lessons and it took a while to play ‘a song’. I think sometimes synthesizers let us forget about struggling since you can turn them on and make sounds.

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#94

I think Jonny is really trying to get to this next step.

I personally know I’m not willing to put in the work to learn this stuff and I have sort of let go of my curiosity, because I know it isn’t for me (at this time in my musical life at least). Mad love and respect to the people devoted to these tools though, because I love the philosophy, workflow, mindset it cultivates, etc. It just isn’t where I am right now. Because of that, I understand that some people might be intimidated and want to delve in, but feel like support/documentation could be improved. That’s a perfectly fair desire that is being communicated (by some) in a constructive way. So Jonny’s question is - HOW can it be improved?

Instead of ‘no, it’s fine, everything is perfect’ or ‘no, it’s terrible and I demand it get better’ - perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If so, the focus should be on honing in on what the next step is. From there it becomes a matter of whether or not the community has the time and interest in accommodating different learning styles or the concerns of people who are frustrated but remain curious and hopeful. So back to Jonny’s question - what specifically is lacking / how can it be improved?

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#95

Wow, I might need to leave this whole thread alone for a while.

Monome (and some mannequins) products and their uses are in a state of becoming at all times.

I did not jump on the first round of norns, or the second, nor do I even have one now even though I’ve had eyes on them from the jump. Now that the documentation has rounded out further and the library that this community is building together has grown substantially, I’m saving my pennies!

In a way, consider crow to be in open beta (IT IS NOT IN BETA, I’M SPEAKING METAPHOR) maybe? The hardware is final, the firmware is in place, but what it does and why will grow as we move it along. This is not a “love it or leave it” situation, rather an infancy stage for a new product that does not follow the same type of rollout schedule that other consumer tech products do.

If the doc is not up to your standards yet, maybe wait a bit for it to grow? I think all here can appreciate the desire for deeper documentation of how these things work.

I am also a non programmer (though I occasionally try). I too am very excited for crow! I’m excited to see what it can do! I’m waiting a few weeks to see where it goes from here before I try to add one to my case. We’ve known that it’s been coming for a long time, we’re excited about it, we don’t know all that it can do yet, and we don’t know what its applications will be.

FIRST looks to be the only thing that will work right out of the box with minimal connectivity requirements, and it looks like it does as much as other $200 modules I’ve spent money on before.

Who knows, maybe it could be like my experience with W/ (mine was all positive by the way) in that it won’t really make sense until I have it in front of me and I work with it for a while. W/ has no knobs, no encoders, its tiny, it doesn’t make a ton of sense at first, and now I use it in nearly every patch either as a long form looper, a delay line, a warbly varispeed thing… and I rarely have to look at the doc for it any more except to do something that I do infrequently.

I would in some ways say that we know exactly what we are getting with crow. Right now that something is a piece of hardware that doesn’t do a whole lot unless some deep diving is done by the early adopters (that can be you too). Or we wait and stand on their shoulders (or maybe peek over their shoulders as they build this new thing).

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#96

To clarify, my thoughts at this point aren’t specific to Crow but to the newb experience in general…

And I plan to order a Crow very soon…

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#97

I’m missing something in this discussion. I see expressions of appreciation, sharing perspectives, and folks trying to help (as in most discussions here). Would someone mind pointing me to an example of this? I’m not detecting it.

#98

Fair point, I was probably oversimplifying to show both possible extreme reactions.

1 Like