Unexpected art

Sometimes your failures are more interesting than your successes. I’ve been doing some work to design a new music controller based on the cheesebox, but adding rounded corners. There are lots of ways to make rounded corners, FreeCAD even has a command called “Fillet” that will do this for you. But I thought I’d do it the hard way, which involves cutting off each corner and replacing it with a cylinder. You can see the results of my first attempt above. I think it is quite artistic. And hey, one corner correct out of four isn’t a bad score..

This is the final version. There are four controller rings with lights, and a button grid and controller on the bottom. The only problem with this design is that it won’t fit on the printer bed………

This is the final, printer friendly, design.

..and this is after it has been produced by two friendly printers…..

Simply Piano has made me into a Disney Princess

Much to my surprise, I’m still doing my piano practice every day. I’m using the Simply Piano app which works very well for me. Up until recently I was able to coast a bit, what with being made to play the piano when I was much younger. But now I’m learning stuff that is properly new to me and making a tiny bit of progress every day.

Anyhoo, Simply Piano has got hold of the rights to a bunch of Disney tunes for me to practice which has been great fun. The way they arrange the exercises it sounds like you’re part of a performance with singers and full accompaniment (although I’m always a bit sorry for the person who has to sing along with my playing). Good playing gets you stars for each piece. Eighteen stars and you’re a performing princess. Twenty four stars (a perfect performance in everything) and you get to be a prince. Not sure if I’m going to make it, but I’m enjoying trying.

Pure Data in HackSpace Magazine

The October issue of HackSpace magazine is out. You can find it here, or in “all good newsagents” as they say. It’s a good read in spite/because of an article that I wrote. I’ve been playing with Pure Data music programming for a while (ever since I got an Organelle last year to play with during lockdown) and so I thought I’d write an article about it. Pure Data is a really good way to create applications that work with streams of audio data. Well worth a look.

Waveshare WM8960 Audio Hi-Fi Sound Card HAT

I’ve been looking for a soundcard that will let me let me create a PureData powered musical instrument based on a Raspberry Pi device. This one looked like it might fit the bill. It even has two tiny microphones and comes with a pair of speakers.

The hardware isn’t directly supported by the Raspberry Pi operating system, so you have to do a mildly complicated install which involves downloading GitHub repository and then running an init script. My pro tip: rather than using Git clone from the command line (which will insist on you giving a GitHub username and password that you’d really rather not) use the browser to download the zip archive and then unzip the files onto your desktop.

I couldn’t get it to work (which is nothing new for me). I filed an online support request from the product page and was very surprised to get a prompt response offering help. Buoyed by this I had another go, starting from a brand new fresh install of Raspian. This worked a treat. Better yet, both the speakers and the microphone work perfectly with PureData (as long as I remember to start PureData in supervisor mode):

sudo puredata

If you are looking for an “all in one” audio solution for your Pi this is a very good bet. The speakers are OK for their size. The only thing it is missing is line audio in. You can only record from the onboard microphones. However, they do supply a full schematic, so if you are handy with a soldering iron and fine wire you might be able to make your own. And the support is very good. They even got back to me to ask how I was getting on after their first response.

Burnby Hall Pictures

It’s a nice day. Why not go to Burnby Hall and take some pictures. Why not indeed.

Potting shed. With pots.

Twisty Cube Puzzle Thing

I’m very fond of hand-held electronic puzzles. This one is rather neat. It is rather like Rubik’s cube, but rather than make sides the same colour you have to make the colours on the two moveable elements line up with an arrangement shown on the four in the middle. You do this by flipping them and rotating them.

The blurb for the device goes on about the educational benefits of the toy, but I’m not particularly convinced about that. I just find it fun to play with.

PICO MIDI CheeseBox video

I’ve made a tiny video to show what the PICO Musical cheesebox can do. If you want to make one of your own I’m going to put all the code and designs up on GitHub and it will all be explained in an upcoming article in HackSpace magazine.

Mucho PICOS

The Raspberry Pi PICO is turning into a “consumable” device for me. They are small and cheap enough to spread all over the place, have a huge pin count and, best of all, you can program them in Python. I’ve just bought another batch.

Real fake wood

The PICO MIDI CheeseBox now looks even more “boxy” after I discovered a supplier of wood effect “sticky backed plastic”. There’s quite a lot in the roll that I bought. I reckon I’ve got enough to make around 50 more.

In other news, we had to eat the cheese today as the entire fridge/house was starting to smell of camembert. It was very nice though.

PICO Musical MIDI CheeseBox is a thing!

I’ve been wondering for a while what my PICL musical instrument reminds me of. Today it hit me like a lump of cheese. It looks like a cheesebox. I was so excited about this realisation that I shot out to the shops to find some camembert to compare it with…..

Inkscape is awesome

I’m making some documentation for my little music box. Settings for the box are managed by setting pixel colours to represent different values. Above you can see the settings for the red (tune) track. You hold down the tune button and then step through the settings on each note key. I made the diagram above using Inkscape. It is an awesome program. In a trice I’d found a way of making a circle of perfectly spaced buttons, then I was creating blocks of text filled with the appropriate colours and lining them up together.

Inkscape drawings are represented as SVG files so you can enlarge and transform them as much as you like. The program is a free download and there are versions for lots of different platforms. The learning curve is a bit steep, but the internet is full of videos describing how to do things (for example draw 12 circles in a ring as above).

Creative Coding

When I was doing programming lectures I used to go on about how creative programming is. I also make the point in the introduction to my latest book (subtle plug). I’ve just spent all of today proving the point. The weather has been horrible, so we were forced to stay indoors and do stuff. So I wrote some more code.

My silly little PICO music box can now store multiple rhythm tracks which can be made to run at different speeds. It has a full setting editor using coloured pixels. I rather enjoy playing with it to make little looping sound sequences.

It’s a strange and wonderful feeling when something that you are making starts to take on a life of its own. I’m sure that artists and musicians get it, programmers get it too. Big time.

Found Bike Pictures

I was going through a memory card from a camera and I found these pictures that I’d completely forgotten about.

Shed Built

I think that the true reason for the existence of the internet is so that you can share pictures of your shed. Here’s mine. I didn’t build it. Neil came round and in the space of a couple of hours managed to do well what it would have taken me a day to do badly.

Writing Code for Fun

I’ve had a really splendid day writing code. I’ve got loads of video games and other stuff to play with, but I’ve ignored all of them in favour of making some Circuit Python. With occasional stops for tea breaks of course.

Frequent tipper

Took a bunch of stuff to the tip again today. I wonder if council tips have “frequent tipper” schemes. If so, I’d probably be up for a silver award.

Achievement Unlocked: We now own a shed

Actually we don’t own a shed as such just yet. Rather, we’ve got a collection of pieces of wood which one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) will be fixed together to form a shed-type building. The pieces arrived this morning at 6:45 am. At 6:55 it started to rain for the first time in a while. So I was out in the wet before breakfast trying to cover over the really big bits of wood so that they would remain dry enough for painting.

Fortunately I seemed to manage it and later on in the day when the rain had stopped and the sun came out I was able to give all the woodwork two coats of hopefully waterproof paint.

Writing a MIDI application on a Rasbperry Pi PICO

I seem to have written 500 lines of Python which is now running inside a Raspberry Pi PICO. I’ve no real idea how much space this occupies on the device, all I can say is that it works really well. I’m using the Thonny IDE which has a setting for Circuit Python and works a treat.

I’m building a MIDI keyboard device (that’s what the box here is for). One of the great things about this is that the when you use the Adafruit adafruit_bus_device and adafruit_midi libraries from here you have a MIDI device that works with MIDI applications on your PC (I’m using Pure Data), but you also retain the serial port connection from the PC to the device. So you can write Python to send MIDI messages at the same time as use the console for talking to your program. Very useful and rather fun. And I’m loving writing Python again.

Lego Vidiyo is a good value at knockdown prices

Not everything that Lego touches turns to gold. Lego Vidiyo has not been the success that Lego hoped and figures and sets are now on the market at temptingly low prices.

The idea of the product is very good. Place animated mini-figures in augmented reality pop videos and control the action using collectable tiles that you scan with your phone or tablet camera. Add in some stage sets that can be incorporated into the videos, tie in with the music publishers so that there’s a good range of 1 minute music clips and you’d think they would be on to a winner.

And I think they would have been, if the application that underpins the whole thing had been a bit better. As it is, the program ls clunky to use, insists on downloading stuff when you start it up and has a confusing interface. The videos are great fun, the sharing element is well implemented and safe for kids, but the whole thing is just that bit too painful to enjoy using.

This has of course not stopped me from picking up a bunch of figures and sets at knock down prices. After all, Lego is Lego. Although I’ve not managed to pick up the party llama yet.

Lego say that they are only resting the project for now. I hope this is true. I think it has massive potential once they’ve sorted out the software side.

...but what does it do?

Now have a working box with lights and buttons. It is quite pleasing of itself. But what does it do?