#1

While looking into ways to get more than 2 voices out of Norns (with Crow) it dawned on me that Ansible might fill the void I was looking for. Now, I’m not well versed in the world of MIDI, so hopefully someone can confirm or deny: If I plug Norns into the Ansible USB port and activate MIDI mode on norns, will Ansible output 4 pairs of v/oct and trig voltages to correspond to the note events on Norns? I think Ansible would be in the “poly” midi mode for this to work, but not sure.

appreciate thoughts and input

#2

There’s not a way for this to work from a hardware perspective. Norns and Ansible are both USB hosts, they are both expecting you to plug in a USB midi device. A USB A-A cable should only be used with Ansible when it’s in bootloader mode and should not be used with Norns – both machines will be trying to supply USB power and current may go Somewhere, could be Somewhere Bad. Norns USB mini port (for supplying power) uses an FTDI chip (for connecting a terminal session with screen) so Norns can’t act as a class compliant USB midi device.

The closest thing to what you want here is possibly Norns connected to Crow and Crow sending i2c messages to Ansible to control gate / CV outputs. In that case midi is not involved at all. Or there are some approaches people have found for sending midi between 2 different USB hosts but it requires another microcontroller in the middle, for example 2host.

#3

if I use a sevillasoft in between will that work? I’ve successfully used to to have my Norns chat with iPad…

https://compasflamenco.com/midi-c-3/midi-usbusb-p-4.html

#4

other than connecting the i2C headers together, how would ansible know what info its getting from Norns? would it take a particular script in Norns/Ansible (apologies for my ignorance)

#5

I’d expect this to work then.

Crow and Ansible would need to be on the same I2C bus, but with no USB device connected to Ansible you can control its CV and gate output over I2C, for example with crow.ii.ansible.cv(1, 2.5) in a norns script. If using an existing Norns script you probably need to modify the script to send the commands you want to Ansible.

#6

crow.ii.ansible.cv(1, 2.5)

I found that ii.ansible commands work when Ansible is in Teletype mode.