#76

performance differences between 3B and 3B+ devices will be absolutely negligible when it comes to basic scripting (midi/etc) and softcut performance.

the slightly faster cpu on the 3B+ may allow you to design supercollider engines which don’t run well on a 3B, however. leveraging this tiny improvement is deeply discouraged given the goal of this ecosystem is broad shared support. this is the reason we’re not officially supporting the pi 4: it splinters the community.

so, any slowdowns you’re experiencing with midigrid is a bug, and should be reported.

the takeaway is: get a 3B or 3B+, it doesn’t matter: our goal is to support both and have them act basically identically.

(takeaway: if you feel you need to squeeze that extra bit of cpu and run a custom supercollider engine right up to the edge of capability, please keep it private, or share a more broadly-stable version).

15 Likes
#77

This is really appreciated. It is very nice to not have to worry about if a script will run on your system or not. This is what ultimately got me to get a Norns Shield. There is an ecosystem and a welcoming and friendly community.

4 Likes
#78

can someone correct me if i’m wrong?

the only reason I recall getting interested in 3b+ was to upgrade regular norns…for more expandable memory (4gb -> 32gb)

since the shield uses micro sd for storage there’s no need to upgrade if that’s your concern, just swap out the sd for the size you want

2 Likes
#79

Thanks @tehn, that’s really useful to know. It may just be that midigrid (controlling 2x Launchpad Mini Mk3 in my use case) can’t handle the scripts in question compared to a grid proper (I’m thinking specifically of one script that is just slow, but wasn’t developed with a grid in fact).

Absolutely agree on this - it was a year or so of reading about the Norns Shield here that encouraged me to take the dive, and I’ve not regretted it for one moment, and have equally learned a lot just from doing so.

1 Like
#80

The compute model doesn’t have a faster CPU between 3 and 3+, from what I’m reading.

1 Like
#81

sorry if my statement was confusing

i was merely speaking about my personal reason for choosing one over another, but the intention to make the platform identical (as tehn mentioned) is probably why i never dug deep to find info on cpu differences

all i needed was more space for samples and tape

2 Likes
#82

3B vs 3B+: It’s worth pointing out that the 3B only has 2.4GHz wifi on board. The 3B+ has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi on board.

It’s not something everyone has to worry about, though if that particular detail matters to you it might really matter.

3 Likes
#83

i wasn’t aware of this— very good point if you have a newer router that doesn’t work with 2.4GHz.

@glia the suggestion to get a CM3+ is for the disk space, yeah!

1 Like
#84

Got my Shield up and running, I just hadn’t realized I needed a micro sd card instead of regular sd card, fortunately my Morphagene could lend me one. This is clearly on error on my part as I didn’t check the specs for RPi 3+ properly, but this could be worth mentioning on the product page, even though the link there does go to microsdhc card on Adafruit.

1 Like
#85

Hello I started having some noise peaks, they are louder if I wiggle around the input for power supply.

The adapter looks like this:

IMG_20210122_224331
IMG_20210122_2243313120×4160 1.85 MB

Please help =[ I think I didnt have this issue before. All I did recently was just updating the shield via menu. Thanks!

#86

try turning down the MONITOR level and making sure MONITOR isn’t fed into the reverb. the system has the ability to digitally amplify the input greatly, so if your settings are badly tuned you’ll get a lot of noise.

1 Like
#87

Thank you so much!!! I dont see those peaks on the shield now but I can see regular jumping in ableton to about this level

Zrzut ekranu 2021-01-22 o 23.00.49

Can I do anything more about this or just forget about it because this noise is inevitable? One more question: the norns unit works a bit better in this matter than the shield?

#88

you may have ground loop issues. can you try powering off a USB battery?

1 Like
#90

howdy, any way to switch the norns shield output to mono? i see the monitor mode setting but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the output.

ah it’s for monitoring input! duh. thanks

#91

as it happens, there’s not a mono output mode.

monitor mode is for input.

2 Likes
#92

I received my Shield yesterday (which arrived faster than expected from the US to Japan) and built it this morning. The most complicated part was peeling the acrylic cover :slight_smile: . Very nice kit, perfect for people like me with no time and space for soldering…

It worked right away of course, even when powered with my small portable phone battery (that outputs about 2A, I’ll see if that’s still enough if I power USB devices at the same time).

It’s really been a delightful experience so far (the maiden web interface is really a clever and painless way to manage scripts), thanks again to everyone involved in this project.

12 Likes
#93

Hi there folks, hope you are all safe and well out there? I wondered, can Norns Shield be a sound processor e.g can it take audio in?

#94

Absolutely! Shield has two 3.5mm audio connections - one in and one out. Plenty of scripts do recording and live sampling with interesting results :slight_smile:

#95

Amazing, I am looking to use it to bridge the gap in the Polyend Tracker as a looper. My hope is to be able to use like a little Zoom recorder and loop inside the Norns Shield and then record into the Polyend Tracker, sound possible? Cheers!

#96

I’m not super familiar with Polyend but Norns has a system-level audio recorder in Tape which is pretty basic (just records and plays) but does the job especially for recording from internal scripts. There are also specific scripts such as Reels which is kind of an emulation of the OP-1 tape recorder, and any number of interesting sample/delay/loop options like Barcodes and the mighty Cheat Codes 2

edit: another thing which i think is really great about norns is the granular control over different levels - ie. separate volume controls for input, output, internal audio output, monitor (audio through) output etc. Makes it very easy to handle audio as it passes through the system imo.

2 Likes