Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] MIDI-controllers?
From: David Slomin (david.slomin_AT_av.com)
Date: Thu Mar 16 2000 - 12:38:38 EST
"Karl W. MacMillan" wrote:
>
> Depending on what you are after you might take a look at the basic
> stamp manufactured by parallax:
In school I built a pretty nifty MIDI controller using one of these.
It took the shape of a glove which would sense when you used the
standard tonic sol-fa hand signals. It would translate these into
the corresponding notes of the scale, and send them out directly
as note-on and note-off messages. (It figured out hand orientation
using a pair of accelerometers and whether the fingers were closed
using a simple switch.)
This was my first experience with embedded programming, but I can
share the following bits of information:
1. The Basic Stamp, as its name indicates, can only be programmed
using an offbeat form of Basic. You need DOS (or FreeDOS, I
suppose) to run the supported compiler/uploader program. I don't
know if they've released the specs of the object format so that
someone could write a compiler for a better language or port
it to a different platform.
2. The thing has VERY little memory. For my application, I had
to switch to a hardcoded hand position/orientation recognition
scheme rather than my original fuzzy logic mechanism. The fuzzy
logic one was not particularly big or slow at all, but it did
use a few modest arrays which did not end up fitting on the
stamp. You end up being acutely conscious of individual bytes.
3. It's not particularly fast, either. It can handle simple MIDI
output, but I would definitely not want to use one of them for
processing MIDI input on the fly. You could even potentially run
into trouble with trying to send densely-packed CC messages.
Hope this is useful,
Div.
-- David Slomin, Engineer mailto:david.slomin_AT_av.com AltaVista Business Solutions http://solutions.altavista.com/ RFC 822 plaintext email strongly preferred except for attachments
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