Last spring before this blog was a thing, I created an “Oddshot Button” using a hacked Staples Easy Button. The button was simple – while watching a Twitch stream, a press of the button would instantly create a video clip of the last 30 seconds using the Oddshot service.
A few months later Twitch debuted their own ‘Twitch Clips’ service, and Oddshot has since fallen out of use. So I decided to remake this project to work with Twitch Clips!
If you’re looking for a big project button, you can find it at Staples.
Introduced as part of their “That Was Easy” marketing campaign in 2005, the easy button is a large red button that, when pressed, says the phrase “that was easy” via a small speaker.
Its low price of $6.99 is enticing. What if instead of buying a purpose-built large button, we can repurpose an Easy Button for our projects instead?
I’ve been messing around with MIDI for my musical floppy drive project, and it was surprisingly difficult to find detailed information on how to get started with Arduino’s MIDI library. So in this post I’m going to show you, in detail, how to use this library to control anything on an Arduino using MIDI.
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Enough with the in-depth boring stuff. Let’s do something fun with Adalight!
Aside from the relatively straight-forward color data, each Adalight frame is preceded by a small six-byte header. Since this header data is mixed in with a lot of RGB color data, I got to thinking… if this data was pushed to the LEDs, what would it look like?
Now that I’ve calculated the theoretical framerate limits, it’s time to measure the actual framerates my Adalight device is putting out.
Using a logic analyzer and an Arduino Nano, I’m going to measure the framerate at varying Prismatik “Grab Intervals” and baud rates, and compare those numbers to what my calculations predict will happen.
Since I’m experimenting with increasing Adalight framerate, the first step was to try driving the Arduino Nano with a faster serial baud rate.
Unfortunately, Prismatik only supports three baud rates: 9600, 57600, and 115200. But after talking with Patrick Siegler, he pointed out a way to use your own custom baud rate for Adalight or Ardulight devices.
I recently posted a few ideas about how to improve the framerate of an ambilight driven using the Adalight protocol. Before trying to implement some of those options, I thought it would be worthwhile to actually calculate the theoretical framerate limitations.
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One of my first thoughts on how to improve Moppy was to drive it directly via MIDI. At the moment, the format of serial messages sent to the drive controller is proprietary and requires using the “MoppyDesk” application on your PC to convert MIDI notes into playable pins and wave periods.
What if we can skip the PC altogether and simply plug a MIDI cable into the floppy drive controller? The goal of this experiment is just to see if this is feasible.
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