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.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
Note: This project is current a work in progress. This page is likely to change as I progress. Overview The goal of this project is to build a set of “musical” floppy disk drives. That is, to be able to use a floppy disk drive as an instrument that plays Read more…
I’ve previously mentioned that I was initially using this code by James Bruce to drive the ambilight. While I was waiting for the circuit board components to arrive, I thought I would take some time to expand on his work, fix some bugs, and add a few features I thought Read more…
Overview The goal of this project is to build a dynamic backlight, also known as an ‘ambilight’, for my PC monitor. An ambilight changes colors based on the content onscreen, extending your monitor to the wall behind it. By reducing the contrast between the monitor and the background it can Read more…
I keep getting distracted by other projects and ideas, but I wanted to post a brief update on the footwell NeoPixels project. I’ve been working on the data structures and color patterns, but today I wanted to cover something simpler.
For the time being I’m not planning on changing the color of the tC’s interior lighting, which is a nice burnt orange. I’ve toyed back and forth with the idea of replacing the tC’s cubby light and adding a few lights to the cupholders, which on a default setting should match the rest of the lighting. This gives us today’s problem: how do we match the NeoPixel’s color with the other LEDs?
Although Adafruit has an excellent guide on getting started, I thought I would include a short post on using their library for RGB or RGBW strips. This already assumes you’ve got your strip hooked up to an Arduino and have successfully run one of the library’s example sketches. If not, read up on Adafruit’s basic connections tutorial.
Multicolor LED strips generally come in two flavors – solid color and addressable. Solid color strips, as the name implies, have all of their LEDs display the same color. Addressable strips on the other hand allow you to control the color value of every individual LED in the strip. The most popular individually-addressable LEDs on the market at the moment are Adafruit Industries’ NeoPixels, based on the WS2182 chipset. They come in a variety of physical packages including strips, rings, and matrices.