inverseaudio

Overview The reasoning for starting this project was two-fold, firstly, its cool being able to turn your lights on and off with your phone. Secondly, I wanted to have an excuse to learn how to make mobile apps for controlling electronics projects. This post will just cover the hardware aspects, and use an already available Android Bluetooth serial app. The creation of a specific app will be covered in a future post once it is done. This was the app I used for getting everything up and running.  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.kai_morich.serial_bluetooth_terminal&hl=en_NZ&gl=US Electronics The electronics for this project are extremely simple, they just consist of an Arduino nano, an HC-06 Bluetooth module, and a 4 channel relay module. Four bare power outlets with screw terminals are also required to actually plug stuff in, although depending on your application you could just wire whatever device you want to control directly to the relay.  The HC-06 m...

 Overview I've started to learn C# to make mobile apps with Xamarin forms for controlling some of my electronics projects. To familiarize myself with the syntax and idiosyncrasies of C# I decided to make a basic serial monitor desktop app using Windows Forms. I basically modelled it of the serial monitor included in the Arduino ide, and tried to add small improvements where possible. Code Main steps Layout the GUI Establish serial reading Establish serial writing Improve UX GUI Layout In the past I've made small GUI programs with python and tkinter, so using the Windows Forms design editor was a welcome change. It was very easy to get a basic interface up and running without having to delve too deeply into the code. It was very much a case of dragging and dropping the relevant parts onto the window in the designer and attaching callback function to the relevant events. Serial communication The C#  serial port library is pretty simple and easy to use. All it needs is a COM port...

Update I've been trying to move away from using the arduino environment and work at the bare metal level for avr mcus. As an experiment I decided to rewrite the code for the audio switcher I wrote about here:   https://inverseaudio.blogspot.com/2020/01/4-channel-audio-switcher.html . Its only a small amount of code so I didn't really expect much difference in terms of code, but it seemed like a good starting exercise. The code compiled within the arduino environment used 1014 bytes (49%) of the program memory, and 15 bytes (11%) of the dynamic memory. I was incredibly surprised to find that the version written in pure c, compiled with atmel studio used only 220 btyes (2.7%) of the program memory, and 2 bytes (0.4%) of the dynamic memory. The only major changes made to the code were the omission of the enum classes, the gpio pin setup, and the setting of the multiplexer pins. In such a small project the space savings weren't entirely necessary. However, I think...

Overview The goal of this project for me is to learn more about midi protocol, and venture into ableton live remote midi scripts. This is a basic transport controller for ableton live, but it can be used for any DAW if you manually map the controls to the CC numbers sent by the arduino. The downside of using the arduino nano is that it uses a usb to serial chip to be able to program the atmega328p. As a result of this it requires the use of a serial to midi bridge to be able to communicate with midi devices. I used Hairless MIDI < - > Serial bridge to do this, which can be found here  https://projectgus.github.io/hairless-midiserial/ . If using windows you will also need some sort of virtual midi port to be able to route the midi messages to ableton, the one I use can be found here  http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html . I only use windows so I'm not sure what needs to be done for mac or linux. The next version I work on will use atmega328u4 wh...

Overview The purpose of this project was as a test to see if the 4051 mux would be usable in audio switching. I've been designing a programmable guitar pedal switcher and used this as a test project to see if there were any fatal issues with using them for this purpose. I also had some attiny85s around and hadn't found a project for them. Being able to use two pins to control the select lines of 3 muxes was a perfect use case. In a future iteration I'll try the 4052 mux, the only reason I didn't use one this time is because I didn't have any, and I have heaps of 4051s lying around. Bill of Materials Attiny85 3 x 4051 Multiplexers 2 x Momentary buttons 4 x Leds 5 x Stereo sockets 1 x 7805 Voltage regulator 2 x 10uF electrolytic capacitors 3 x 1k resistors Code The code for this is pretty basic, and self explanatory, with the attiny only using 2 inputs and 2 outputs. Each of the buttons either increments or decrements the current channel. Since ...