I also see the same voltages at the inputs on my crow. I don’t have any reason to think it’s defective, not sure what the cause of this is but I’m not too worried about it.

Almost totally off-topic part of the post

As far as I know this is generally not a problem in euro since outputs are buffered and modules are designed with the expectation that people may patch outputs to outputs by mistake, often for long periods of time, and generally that freely experimenting and patching anything to anything should be safe. It does sometimes make me a bit nervous and I would not be surprised to learn of cases where you should definitely not do this! I know I have done this a lot accidentally. But also purposefully: passive mixing can be really interesting and useful. If you know all the output impedances are the same, this is just averaging, so like a unity mixer but where the outputs are all scaled down evenly, so you don’t clip from adding them together. If the impedances are not the same though, the mixing will be weighted/uneven, which can often be unpredictable and fun to play with. I have been enjoying a lot of patching like this in an LZX video synth system (impedances are standardized) using a particular passive switch matrix which happens to be I2C controllable.

But is it expected behavior?

I am aware of modules having buffered outputs. In fact Tony from Make Noise actively encourages passive mixing of gate sources in the Shared System.

I was wondering about potential damage in other manufacturers modules that may not account for this, also whether the creators expect this.

It also throws off my patching flow when my CV bus is reading HIGH when only an output is connected. :slight_smile:

I’m working on verifying this :slight_smile:
edit for future reader, verified: ^^ crow help: general (connectivity, device q's, ecosystem)

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Thanks @dan_derks. I really appreciate all the support from everyone.

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the 1v on the inputs i believe is a very weak pull-up due to the auto-calibration circuitry and is not a defect and should not have any impact on your system— but i’ll wait for @Galapagoose to confirm and explain.

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The voltage you can read off an input cable is the input circuit’s reference voltage. It’s not ‘outputting’ in that there is minimal current potential (that voltage is behind a big resistor!). Attach that input cable to any output and the signal will precisely track that source.

The weird benefit of this is you can use an input as a ‘switch’ by plugging/unplugging an unpatched cable. Just set the input to default ‘change’ mode, and the event will be called on connect/disconnect.

re: Make Noise modules. I didn’t realize their ‘low’ voltage was 0.7V. I’ll increase the default ‘threshold’ voltage in the next firmware.

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Thanks for the clarification @tehn and @Galapagoose. ^^ crow on ^^

i am a little confused by this. I was using one of the Bowery apps that i wish to keep after power down. But when i power back up it is replaced by First. How can i keep a different app to autoload on power up ie autoload from flash without druid. Rename a Bowery app as default.lua?

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Executing u <appname>.lua in druid will upload it into permanent flash memory!

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Hello all, super interested in crow but want to check something. Will it work with grids? Like can I plug grids directly in in the way I could earth sea? Or would I need Norns interfacing also? Just looking to link with my modular.

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It does not link with Grid directly. It links with Norns or computer. Crow is not a USB host.

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Ok cool. Very quick, do you or anybody know if it works with something like expert sleepers host? Or must I use a Monome host.

Short answer: no, you can’t use something like Silent Way with crow (to my knowledge), but you don’t have to use any monome software either.

Long answer:

Expert Sleepers devices appear as USB audio devices, a somewhat complex protocol that’s necessary for real-time streaming at the frequencies ES modules are designed for. This means that lots of DAWs and so forth can send CV or audio data out to an ES-8 or ES-9 and it will spit it out as-is.

crow does not have quite the same design in mind. crow is not a DC-coupled audio interface, just a Lua evaluator behind a plain ol’ serial port: you send it some Lua, it executes it and sends back results. Maybe running some of that code interacts with crow’s CV jacks. This is a really old-school communication mechanism that is comparatively slow, but also dirt simple to talk to, so it’s straightforward to add crow support to lots of other software environments (Max, pd, anything that can talk to a serial port, which is more or less any programming environment made in the last 40 years).

You can manually set crow’s output voltages by sending it a chunk of Lua code like output[2].volts = 2.5, but you can’t really stream voltage values to/from crow at audio rates. Instead, you can script crow to generate LFOs on its own, or react in some way when an input CV crosses some threshold voltage, or whatever. To my knowledge ES devices don’t act autonomously like this, they need to be tethered to a computer, whereas you can upload a script to crow and then use it on its own as just another Eurorack module - a module where you get to define whatever CV processing / generating functionality you want.

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My crow experience has so far been great, from simple druid experiments to modular/ableton syncing with the m4l devices.

Also, fwiw, I haven’t experienced any issues while running both Teletype and crow on the same ii bus. Crow is connected to my tt powered busboard, which serves a relatively big ii network in my 104hp case (ansible, TXi, TXo+, w/ and JF, all daisy-chained). I’m sure I haven’t even come close to stressing the network’s limits, but for my simple needs so far, it’s been stable.

Will continue testing and report back if anything comes up.

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thankyou! I was executing as “run” 'r appname.lua` which I got from here https://github.com/monome/bowery/releases

From the scripting tutorial:

Hopefully that clarifies the difference further!

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I just got crow working with Norns and Druid, still having two different issues right now.

  1. Crow from a Norns script works intermittently when I plug usb into Norns. Sometimes I have to powercycle both Norns and Crow multiple times to get the connection working.

  2. There can be a significant lag on Druid commands executing. Like, up to 60 seconds or so. Other times it is immediate.

I have this issue as well when running norns scripts on crow. It does not work until I restart both. Sometimes I can get it to catch by changing the output on the norns app to something other than crow, and then back to crow…

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I am wondering if this has to do with the i2c chain order? My crow sits between my TT and Just Friends. Is it possible that TT is grabbing JF at power up? I am new to TT, is there a script I could execute sans keyboard to release control of the JF (if that is indeed the issue)? Not sure what order to power up, start things should be but it takes a lot of fiddling to get the connection made.

I’ve only used crow a few times…but i experienced norns - crow connection issue when powering up crow with norns already plugged in. I was able to connect by plugging norns in after starting crow. I’ve only got JF connected so i don’t think it’s related to i2c order.

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