Hi all! I had some quiet time in the Vermont mountains over the holiday and in between snowboarding and eating 1.5 entire apple pies I got a chance to tackle something I’d been curious about, as I know others have: porting monome modules to run inside VCVRack.
Aside from the usual reasons why this would be desirable—practicing & experimenting while away from your rig, exposing the tools to new people—I was even more motivated by the idea that this would make it easier to develop and test alternate firmwares for the hardware modules, and make it easier to build in compatibility for grid sizes/models that one doesn’t own.
To make the Rack version a good simulation environment for the hardware, I wanted to make the virtual module code have as few differences as possible from the firmware code. By hacking together a thin shim layer for (some of) the AVR I/O systems, I’m able to run a build of the WW firmware with only a couple of small cosmetic changes to main.c. (Large sections of libavr32 are mocked or omitted entirely, but important chunks like the event system, the clocks, and monome.c are used unaltered.)
I’m happy to report that this effort has met some initial success! I have a Rack plugin that provides a feature-complete white whale emulation, plus a virtual 128 grid module that simulates (some of) the serial messages that a real one would send. The WW module can connect to one of these virtual grids, or to a real serialosc-connected grid through the right-click menu.
Here’s a quick photo, I’ll upload a video as soon as it’s downloaded from the camera.
(The 256 and the virtual grid are showing different data because the 256 is showing an older state from when it was disconnected. Right now it’s one or the other, you can’t have the virtual grid mirror the real one, but that’s a possibility for the future.)
This is a lesser experience than the hardware, even if you have a physical grid; being able to simultaneously touch the grid and a physical param knob is a big part of the usability of WW. Having said that, I’ve done what I can to make the virtual experience tolerable; on the virtual grid, you can command-click keys to hold them down, necessary for alt/meta key combos, etc.; you can also click-drag on multiple keys to tap out runs, etc.
EDIT: The source repository is now at GitHub - Dewb/monome-rack: VCV Rack plugin for monome Eurorack modules. The original source repo, a fork of the whitewhale firmware is here. The new repo is independent and links in the whitewhale repository as a submodule.
This is a proof-of-concept, not ready for release yet. There are a number of issues to fix and a bunch of questions I wanted to get feedback on before I go further. To get a couple of likely questions out of the way: yes, I suspect it will be easy to extend this to cover the other trilogy modules (and their alt firmwares.) Teletype should also be possible with additional work, and that’s something I’m super interested in. Ansible is trickier due to the increased complexity of the USB features.
Questions:
- Is anyone else working on this or related problems? Am I trampling in anyone’s flowerbeds?
- Does monome have a position on use of brand/product names in derivative works, like Mutable Instruments’ (completely reasonable) desire to only have their name on the genuine article?
- I started this as part of my fork of the whitewhale repo, but it probably ought to move to a separate plugin umbrella repo that links in the firmware repos as submodules. Anyone have opinions on where that repo should live?
- Does this model of connecting to real & virtual grids with the right-click menu make sense? I think it would be pretty neat if VCVRack had a whole simulated serial connection ecosystem to take advantage of, but that’s a bigger conversation.
- What other features do people expect from their virtual grids? Tilt? Multitouch display compatibility? Custom LED colors?