#77

just arriving, so i first wanted to fully endorse @zebra (and his comments), who has witnessed and contributed hugely both technically and spiritually to this project since before its inception.

i’m fundamentally not interested in supporting iOS. i’m starting to stray from being interested in supporting MacOS. (most of you know my interest in windows has never existed, though i’ve burned huge amounts of my time trying to enable people to use it).

but i like the idea of people doing whatever they want! and honestly a super-tiny dongle that converts monome to usb-midi is a pretty sweet suggestion. it’s so easy, and the hardware so unobtrusive. you could integrate external powering as i doubt your iphone wants to power a grid. of course i’m not going to make this thing, but our serial source code has always been open source.

additional huge agreement to @Dewb for the precise insight on the moment in technology 12 years ago!

edit: and yes seems trivial for apple to add CDC. but i understand that the thought of even asking feels like asking our gov’t for legit healthcare. :slight_smile: which is why linux is so (almost absurdly) liberating and exciting.

24 Likes
#78

re: norns to ios. norns can do OSC to remote hosts, and BT-midi no problem. it’s designed to create interactions with grids/etc with simple scripting (lua) that then communicate with less-programmable midi stuff (like synths).

8 Likes
#79

Sheesh man don’t beat me up! I come in peace!

Ok, that’s cool, backwards compatibility is a legit consideration. But let’s not act like hardware can’t evolve and improve.

#80

Ok, not trying to beat you up but I feel like we’re talking past each other and I dunno what that’s about.

I guess I just don’t think midi is an “evolution” here, compared to an extensible data format on top of a generic transport layer.

That said, I basically agree with @TheTechnobear that yeah, transport layer is not fundamental to the device. But it matters when you invoke product design concepts like “plug and play.” Very significant!

I’m totally serious though: apple should have a way to support CDC and HID devices. It should require a permissions key of course. If everyone with an app developer license in this forum said something, and if we suggest that this is yet another way in which android can eat their lunch, they really will listen.

In the meantime - seriously, lets work out what a good bus-powered adapter might look like. Give it some controller logic so it actually is plug+play. Let it support arbitrary diy devices using slipOSC. Does this appeal?

9 Likes
#81

I started hacking on something this afternoon, but just ran outta gas… so will circle back. :grinning:

What’s a canonical link for slipOSC? This is a year or so since it was last updated

2 Likes
#82

I totally agree with @TheTechnobear as well. Maybe I’m just not communicating effectively? I’m sorry for that.

I just don’t think Apple will budge on device support. They already have their MIFi program in place for peripherals, which evidently is a real pain, but that’s the way they want it. Perhaps I’m pessimistic? I suspect if I were to bring up Monome or similar devices, the response would be “we have class compliant midi support, use that.”

To clarify one point: there is no contradiction between my suggestion that you build a controller which is plug-and-play with some hosts and advertising a controller which is plug-and-play with all hosts. Know what I mean? Let’s not get bogged down in the semantics of plug-and-play.

Some sort of little monome adapter would be the way to go, given the desires on your end. Seems a bit inelegant, but hey if it works, cool :slight_smile:

#83

I think a wireless midi adaptor would be delightful. Has anyone tried pairing a teensy with a Bluetooth module capable of doing wireless midi?

1 Like
#84

I have a back-burner project that uses a Feather board with a BLE chipset. My needs require higher resolution than 7bit so I began all my tests with the BLE chip in UART mode. It worked surprisingly well.

It appears there is a tutorial on Adafruit to use the BLE MIDI profile with a Feather. This should be exactly what you’re looking for.

4 Likes
#85

So I prototyped a thing tonight because of this thread.

Teensy 3.6 as USB host - monome to midi translator

For the moment it’s pretty dumb - just sends a note-on/off for note number (using x/y translated to 0-127) and lights up the led of the button you pressed.

Here’s some debug output.

USB Host - Serial
*** USERIAL1 Device 16c0:483 - connected ***
  manufacturer: monome
  product: monome
  Serial: m4676000
grid key: 6 4 dn - Send note-on : 70 
grid key: 6 4 up - Send note-off: 70 
grid key: 11 1 dn - Send note-on : 27 
grid key: 11 1 up - Send note-off: 27 
grid key: 0 0 dn - Send note-on : 0 
grid key: 0 0 up - Send note-off: 0 
grid key: 1 6 dn - Send note-on : 97 
grid key: 1 6 up - Send note-off: 97

So… who wants to back my kickstarter? :laughing:

15 Likes
#86

I’m sorry things got tense here. As a new and very happy user of audulus and long time user of monome stuff, I can’t help but to think that nothing but good can come of you being here.

4 Likes
#87

How about you open-source Audulus like Monome has done with its software? We’d be more than happy to help implement OSC support for you over wifi.

My monome is a few years old (six or eight?), then I might be tempted to try Audulus! I see some requests for OSC support on your forums as well.

3 Likes
#88

OSC enabled greater scalability as well, because it’s a network protocol by design (you can have midi over network too with additional layers, but that’s a different subject). serialosc, being an exceptionally well designed protocol bridge, contributed to that too.

I recall setups having 7 grids in a row acting as one control surface for m4l. I cannot imagine midi devices working seamlessly in the same way.

3 Likes
#89

Oh, sure you could. Whether you use MIDI or OSC in 2019 is likely a matter of taste.

The music in this video is not at all to my taste, but it is an example of a mess of grids doing highly coordinated stuff thanks to MIDI.

The two protocols have their pros and cons. For some uses they are nearly interchangeable, and for others one really makes a lot more sense than the other.

2 Likes
#90

I would love to open source Audulus. But I have to make a living, and I don’t have hardware to sell.

4 Likes
#91

3 posts were split to a new topic: Grid-usbmidi hardware bridge

Grid-usbmidi hardware bridge
#92

first of all, very interesting and educational to read about some of the history and the reasoning behind the design - thanks to all the folks who provided the info and the historic context!

re: the original topic - i think some very good reasons were given on why this has to be a separate thing. but if it is then why stop at a simple monome-MIDI adapter? it’ll likely be something teensy (or similar) based. so why not develop some apps for it? as @zebra says, give it some controller logic - the simplest form would be supporting an earthsea style keyboard, or using it as an x/y pad controller. but why not create some apps too, like the actual earthsea implementation? (i have more specific thoughts on what could be done but i think the split thread is a more appropriate place, will post there).

to clarify, this would be in addition to having a simple mode as suggested by @audulus, so it would also support that use case. but being able to also use it as more of a plug’n’play (not only that but having some apps that the community is already familiar with) would make it a much more attractive proposition. imagine taking a grid and this converter and being able to plug it into a MIDI synth and use earthsea with it.

19 Likes
Norns: ideas
#93

Yessssss please !!! :clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

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#94

back in 2015 we made a grid study for writing software for a monome host using an arduino: https://monome.org/docs/grid-studies/arduino/ …but for the primary reason that i was not pursuing this platform myself and making projects for it… i suspect not many people dove in or even knew it existed.

having a framework and compelling examples and collaborators is what creates interest in a project, so this teensy-based proposition is quite compelling indeed. amazing as always @scanner_darkly

17 Likes
#95

update - dunno if you are at WWDC, but they are opening up IOKit a little for Catalina - now supports userspace drivers in macOS 10.15 beta. with explicit support for arbitrary usb-serial and usb-hid devices.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usbserialdriverkit
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hiddriverkit

very cautiously optimistic that they may announce something similar for iOS 13 (??) and we can finally just have HID and CDC support on iOS (like every other OS.)

(i have been making noise to Fruit People about this since we opened the conversation, and have encouraged other developers to do so also. who knows, maybe the scales are tipping.)

(and ech, no, of course i haven’t taken the time to actually build a little bridge guy. :frowning: did verify that SAMD21 is sufficient and can support a minimal lua stack. might still happen but not this summer.)

13 Likes
#96

I’m with you. I think that they’ve introduced “iPadOS” at least implies that they just might loosen things up a bit so an iPad can compete with a laptop in terms of peripherals. We shall see :slight_smile:

4 Likes