a report to the -bar: metalab pocket pianos get knobs and midi

[Jay Vaughan]

hello music-bar,

so at last nights friday-night hack/jam session at metalab, which  
lasted until 4am this morning, me and marius worked on our little  
critterguitari pocket piano kits, which no doubt you all remember  
being bored about me talking about last week.

we added MIDI, and it works great!  so whatever synth you run on the  
PP (FM, OctARP, etc.) can now be controlled remotely by MIDI Note and  
CC change messages .. so i've got not just 4 nice knobs and 25 buttons  
on the little machine itself, but the faderfoxes too.  oh, and i put  
some very lovely silver knobs on both pocket pianos, so that they're  
at least very fun to play with now.

i added a 'page mode' to the PocketPianoFM interface code, as well as  
12 new wavetables (thanks marc!) that can be user-selectable, and  
which totally weirds out the FM but sounds *fantastic* to my ears, and  
Marius added all the hardware bits to get MIDI rolling and then  
proceeded quite smoothly with adding a MIDI parser/handler into  
PocketPianoFM, too.  i made some headway on producing an envelope  
generator as well, will pick up on that next now that i've got page  
mode.

didn't take any pictures or make any recordings yet, because we're not  
finished getting things upgraded to where we want to jam a bit, yet,  
but rest assured its on the horizon.  these little machines are  
providing hours of truly inspiring, low-grade, ultra-low-power,  
*fun*.  70eur,- worth of great fun!

though, the PCB is a bit annoying in its bare-naked minerality, and so  
i really want to put the case together soon.  so we're not 'playing'  
yet so much as still constructing, alas.  while we were hacking away  
at all this in the metalab hardware workshop, the CNC was grinding  
away making new parts for the next stage of the Meta-RepRap project,  
and i was of course constantly reminded with every grind and groan of  
the machine (hours of it) that a pimp panel and a completed case for  
both machines is just a few vectors away from being a reality.

with the prospect of the CNC and the existing reprap (which is  
experiencing mild technical difficulties and is thus undergoing  
extensive testing too) making a few interesting 3d control-surface  
elements, we may just have the stompin'-est less-than-100-euro  
synthesizers we can find to play!  we'll take these kits and use them  
as a basis for a metalab hack session in the future, so thats also  
something nice to look forward to on the horizon: a public synth-diy  
workship in vienna!

stay tuned, i'll spunge more on this next week as we continue the  
software crusade and get a few other nice bits of stuff ground  
together too ..

;
--
Jay Vaughan