A different Arduino Sequencer in progress

elmegil

After watching Bubzy's progress, I got the jones myself. Realized the other day I could gank the rotary encoder from an old mouse "for free", came up with a way to hold the parts together so I could actually use it (one of those plastic things the 25c toys at the grocery come in), and started playing around with display, encoding, and using interrupts to get reasonable responsiveness out of things. I'm pretty happy with where it is right now, will probably morph and change as I go forward. Of course at this precise moment my only VCA is down, so I probably won't be making actual sounds very soon.

Many thanks to Bubzy in particular about the display: I don't know if what I'm doing there with the circles exactly matches his, but that's definitely where I got the idea to use them the way I am.

Gonna try to embed the video I uploaded, but preview doesn't show it, so we'll see....

MusicMan11712 · Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 2:18 am Post subject:

Very nice. Looking forward to seeing more.
Steve

elmegil · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 9:33 am Post subject:

Have been working more on things that will pay me back lately, but I have done some more thinking about this one.

My original idea had been that i wanted something I could drive my 808 stripboard voices with. But I also wanted to create an arbitrary function generator (see some other discussions in the top level DIY forum) which would need a step sequencer. And I have PCBs for Fonik's Voltage Controlled Pattern Sequencer and the Klee, both of which make me think about using patterns instead of just steps.

I think if I can get the UI right, I can combine all three of these with my Arduino by using one of these:

http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/22103a.pdf

The biggest drawback being that it has to use pull up resistors on the outputs, and I didn't have room for them on my shield... (though I may try to revisit that).

I've already used the shield I created with that chip (as well as the other one I created to combine constant trigger pulse and accent gate in the manner of the original TR-808) to drive the 808 voices I currently have built, and it works great. A step sequencer would take the outputs not to the individual voice boards, but to a secondary board that would handle the banks of pots/switches etc--basically the outputs of this would replace the outputs of a 4017. And a pattern sequencer would be the same, just using different patterns across the pins instead of just a single bit high at a time (in fact it seems trivial to just make the step sequencer a special case of the general pattern sequencer).

It'll probably be a couple more weeks before I can work on combining the display/pattern work from above with the various ideas here, but I'm still poking along....