Lilliputing & Micromachines

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valis
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Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

Hi, my name is Valis and I have a problem. It seems I have a thing for lilliputing machines:

1 Intel Compute Stick (Intel STCK1A8LFC)

1 Raspberry Pi B+ V 1.2
2 Raspberry Pi 2 Model B V 1.1
2 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
2 Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Model B

Rock64 (Rockchip RK3328)
Pine A64 (A64-DB-2G Rev B)

3x NextThing CHIP (maybe 4?)
3x Arduino Uno

I hate to say how many 'full size' computers there are in my house, but this only adds to my problem.

Thank you for listening.
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dante
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by dante »

Ok, - full size computers - I got :

1. Dante’s i9 superdaw 4U
2. Old i7 4790 daw (with Scope cards) 4U
3. 2 HP laptops for work belong to 2 different employers
4. 1 laptop of my own for private contract work
5. Main 6 core office machine (tower)
fra77x2
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

i. 7 arduino UNO
ii. 3 arduino DUE
iii. 15 Attiny 13A... (this is the lilliest so i win)

one arduino uno is connected to my audio system and is used as an IR remote control. It sends midi (via a small app) to XITE and to Reaper. In Xite it controls a switch that i use for A/B comparison with my reference tracks and I can move around and check the sound from different spots in the room. Invaluable.

It also control play/stop/record, goto markers, and "minimize daw" in my daw. I couldn't live without it.

The unos cost was 4e a piece (china clones). This is as a pack of cigarettes.
The dues was 11e per piece.
The Attiny 13A costs around 1euro.

Total cost around 80 euro. They will keep me occupied for the rest of my life I guess.
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valis
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

Well, if we included regular computers I would certainly have a problem:

Systems currently in use in my workspace:
Intel i7-8700, Nvidia GTX 1080, 64GB DDR4, 2TB Samsung NVME SSD, 2x 1TB Samsung SATA SSD, RME HDSPe + Multiface II
Intel Xeon E3-1285, Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, 64GB DDR4, 2TB Samsung NVME SSD, 2x 2TB Samsung SATA SSD,
Intel E5467 Xeon (x2) on Supermicro X7DWA-N, 128GB FB-DIMM, Nvidia GTX970, 2TB SATA boot + 1TB SATA scratch + 7 SATA HD's, RME HDSPe + Multiface II
Intel Prestonia Xeon (P4 era, 2.0Ghz), 2GB RDRAM (4 512MB RIMMS), Nvidia 7600GS AGP, 36.7GB 15k rpm SCSI + 70GB 10k rpm SCSI + 2x 250GB SATA HD, 2x Pulsar2 + Scope 7
AMD Phenom II X4 955, Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0, Nvidia GTX960 32GB DDR3, 2x 1TB SATA SSD, 3x 1TB SATA HD
Dell Optiplex 160 (minicomputer used for running Pinguin Audio Meter to 7" LCD)

Mac Pro 3,1 (2.8Ghz/32GB FB-DIMM), Nvidia GTX960 & GTS120, 2TB SATA Boot + 3x 1TB SATA SSD
Mac Pro 3,1 (2.8Ghz/32GB FB-DIMM), 2x Nvidia Quadro4000 (Mac Edition), 2TB SATA Boot + 3x 1TB SATA SSD
iMac 14,3 21.5", 16GB DDR3 SODIMM, 1TB SATA SSD (aftermarket)

Laptops:
Macbook Pro 11,3, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD
Macbook Pro 4,1, 8GB RAM, 1TB SATA SSD
Eluktronics N870HK1 17" Laptop (GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, 512GB NVME SSD, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB SATA SSD)

Children's computers:
AMD Phenom II x4 820, Nvidia GTX960, 16GB DDR2, 240GB SSD & 320GB HD
iMac 12,1 21.5", 8GB DDR3 SODIMM, 1TB HD


Legacy systems (not in use):

Supermicro P6DNH & 2x Intel KB80521EX200 512K (Pentium Pro)
Supermicro S2DGR Slot 2 (Pentium II/III Xeon, have several slot 2 cpu's in a box)
2x Asus P2B-DS (dual slot 1, P3-600's outran everything up until P4 era in 3d rendering due to l2 cache size)
2x Asus P3B-F (single slot 1, used to overclock Celerons in slot1 adapters)
A box of Intel slot 1/2 pentium II/III cpu's and Celerons
1 486DX (no motherboard anymore)
1 386SX
1 Compaq Luggabe 8086 based 'portable' with green monochrome monitor
1 Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer II
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valis
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

Anyway I've been fiddling with my Intel Compute Stick since the get-go to get it running stably. The default Ubuntu installation had very poor support for the CPU this comes with (CPU halt issues every few seconds) and poor GPU support. Later versions of Ubuntu resolve those problems but kill Bluetooth + wifi making it unusable (there's only 1 USB port, and using USB ethernet off of a hub makes the keyboard/mouse very laggy when doing transfers). I think I finally have it stable on a recent version of Ubuntu using a .sh script to compile the Ubuntu ISO that was discussed on Reddit.

Similarly, all of my Raspberry Pi's are put to good use here. 2 of them get system sensor data from AIDA64 from various windows computers and display that data on small monitors around the studio so I can keep an eye on how the machines are holding up both under load and at idle. Another raspberry Pi runs DNS filtering, Grafana (for displaying various statistics from the webserver and web services) and Spiceworks (monitors all OSes in the studio for software & hardware level updates).

I need to find a use for my older Raspberry Pi's, Arduinos, Pine64 & Rock64.
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

I 'm not really sure why you are doing this to youself, but if you care for an advice you should optimize your workspace, and get rid of all this sensory pollutants. This lifestyle is gonna have a tremendous toll on your mental and physical health. Having a lot of stuff is not some way to display your abilities (i mean to yourself) you should learn to treat your mind and body in a friendlier way, you are not a machine and you should not treat yourself as an extension of your workplace. Machines are expandable you are not. Choose one or two jobs that you think you should focus on and let all the other stuff go.
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

My title was in jest, of course. Other than a few of them being older than I like, all of the machines have a place. Some are used at live events, some for 3D animation & etc, some for music. Acquiring Computers when you live on the West Coast is hardly challenging, a good deal of those came either through business investments or business relationships as well.

I am curious to discuss Arduino or raspberry pi projects in the lake with you if you have anything interesting to share.
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

I suppose acquiring computers is not challenging anywhere in the world, paying for the workforce to put them in use is the problem. Anyway. Yes we can discuss about arduino. It don't have raspberry pi because i like to use microcontrollers without an os, and program bare metal in c. I am not any type of expert, but I have done many projects with arduino's. In general I use them to extend my audio experience, so I design dsp stuff like oscillators, filters etc. I have build a modular that runs on arduino due which is controlled by an app from a windows pc. I am making oscilloscopes for different types of signals, I use them as controllers like switches or cv's, triggers for my analogue stuff (I have spend some time learning how to create oscillators filters mixers etc with opamps). What else... You know controlling motors, getting sensor data like temperature or an accelerometer. But that stuff goes very slow because I am getting tired very easily, and I do not stress my self. I consider it like a hobby which i like. I also like the ability to talk with apps I program in windows. A couple of months ago I have spend some time learning some machine learning stuff and planning to make a speech recognition app. It took me about a month but I found some cool code in c for a convolutional network that can identify the MNIST dataset which I studied in depth, and spend some time programming some spectrograms and all the facilities that would allow me to experiment with neural networks for speech and perhaps image recognition. This led me to find code for numerous different machine learning algorithms and compile / study them and some very exotic ones like a "liquid neural network" (influenced by Turing work on morphogenesis). Do you remember the morphogenetic field in Ph. K. Dick's VALIS book?
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by astroman »

I have an Aruino project to clone this device (for lacking funds atm...) :
https://www.synclavier.com/product/synclavier-knob/
Probably going the Teensy 2.0 route and skipping the super fancy design of the original, at least initially.
I‘ve already the spring loaded mechanics and encoder... stripped the jog dial from an old video processor.
Now it‘s about translation of increment/decremente to midi pitch wheel data and that‘s basically it.
(Cameron Jones himself once joked about the „Knob“ as probably the most expensive pitch wheel on earth) :D
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

It seems interesting. The Teency (3.2) has an cortex M4 with DSP opcodes. Now i see a new teency with cortex m7 at 600MHz. It should be very good. wow it costs 20$ it's cheap. I should probably get one.

By my opinion an uno at 16MHz or a due with 84MHz processor (cortex M3) can handle the job especially if you send midi directly. If you interface with a pc app the due offers a "native serial USB" mode that can send data very fast to the pc. Perhaps the teency offers it too. Good luck on your project.
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

That looks interesting astroman. Closer to the mark of what I was thinking.

And fra77x2 of course I'm familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenic field, just as P.K. Dick was by writing about it in my namesake tome. Interesting stuff.

I'm quite happy with my IT related projects that use Pi's, as the power draw each requires is so minimal and SD cards are cheap to replace if and when they fail.

I've had a few moments over the last few years where a computer is overheating or having other issues, and having the realtime monitors running has helped catch things before catastrophe, so quite happy there as well. The only downside there is that without a Pi 4, the screens I've been enjoying the most (4:1 ultrawide 7" & 8.8" IPS lcd's) are a pain to configure for HDMI input. So for the 3 B+'s and 2's, I use the tiny 3.5" LCD's that fit on the pi as a hat inside of a compatible case (ie, a case that holds the screen and Pi both).
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

I was taking an inventory of my excess microcomputers here and thinking of things I can use them for.

What I was originally doing with the Pi 1 & Pi 2 was connecting them to arduinos, and using them to playback LED patterns on custom LED displays. Not in the sense of video playback, but triggering patterns via DMX & OSC via Artnet sent over Wifi. So these 'displays' were constructed from RGB individually addressable LED strings sourced from Ebay & Aliexpress etc, run off of the arduino and controlled by the Pi.

Using a project called OLA allowed us to use the Pi to output DMX directly, and when not controlled by a lighting board I was using something called Vezer on my Macbook Pro to send all of the DMX data to the Pi's. Vezer can also do midi and OSC, both in terms of sending and input control, and it syncs to midi clock and runs nicely alongside Ableton Live which is my main 'control board'.

Clips in ableton trigger Vezer and trigger Resolume or Touchdesigner etc (and of course Live does audio), so that everything is basically driven from a few midi controllers and distributed through software to everything else. This made for nice synchronized programs and easy recall, and I had little issue varying my look over the course of 2-3 days.

For the Pi+Arduino combo itself, we would construct geometric patterns (sacred G bruh) out of 2x2 lengths of wood and affix the LED strips in various lengths to that. By using 2-3 arduinos per construct, it was possible to easily have a dominant preset and secondary one running in tandem on strips attached to opposing geometric shapes all one the same construct. Ie, one arduino rotating colors and doing 1 pattern, the other slowly alternating hues, or maybe each chasing in different directions etc.

The only real restriction was that any single arduino could only drive a certain number of LED's directly before having voltage droop (and colors becoming off), so we either had to amp inline or add more.

The pi was basically the 'head' control unit receiving DMX, using a wifi 802.11n adapter, and then sending simple commands to the Arduino which ran code locally to not only read the GPIO commands and control tempo of a given pattern, and pattern presets as well as dominant/secondary color settings for each preset. This helped me stay in sync with the main lighting board and lighting director's color cues, which were generally also reflected in my choice of footage for playback in Resolume to a projector array (3d mapping) or custom LED array doing video playback.

I bought the Next Thing TheChip's because they were $9 each and had built in bluetooth & wifi before the Raspberry Pi 3 existed, but had problems using them to achieve the same result because the native software distro from them was rather finicky and compiling other linuces was time consuming for something that was going to be single use. The same thing applies to getting a Pine64 (though I got the Rock64 later just because), as the Pi's evolved quickly it wasn't as necessary to find alternatives and eventually we moved to other control brains that are proprietary and easier to maintain & program.

Most of the Pi's and Arduino's were sold or repurposed for other things stage related a few years ago. What I have listed in the parent post is just a small sample that remains.
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

With the Pi's it's easy as there are so many projects out there. There's some cool diy instruments like the following:

https://nilesfromm.com/work/noloop.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf4wISY6VHs

Though more appealing to me are the MOD Duo X & Pisound/MODEP options:
MOD Devices
MODEP & MODE DUO & PiSound hat

Quite a few existing products from TAL & etc have been ported to the Pi (and of course there's Pd), and making a small processing or sound design box from a cheap computer has just as much appeal for me as buying the Wavestate (which is a custom ARM implementation internally).
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by astroman »

fra77x2 wrote: Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:18 pm ... By my opinion an uno at 16MHz or a due with 84MHz processor (cortex M3) can handle the job especially if you send midi directly.... Good luck on your project.
thanks, will need it ... :D
It‘s a great starter project because the target is so simple. As a proof of concept I modelled it on the iPad in one of those „build your own midi control surface“ apps. The important part will be scaling the dial‘s response properly, but that‘s independant from any technical detail.

I choose the Teensy 2 for it‘s 5V compatibility... because a more serious use would be to replace the encoders in my Lexicon Vortex (a modulated double delay line).
For one the encoders are bound to fail one day, but the more interesting aspect is that you can store and recall encoder values much faster than manually if a microcontroller is engaged.
No midi required, but I’ll have to do the software design on my own. Which is fun of course... :D
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

i read the brochure of the knob and i am not really sure i understood exactly how it behaves. if it acts like a potentiometer then you will need a 14bit adc or a 16 bit one. the adc on arduino uno is 10bit and on the due 12 bit i am not sure about the teency. you can find 16 bit adc for 10e. scaling the value should be easy or applying any curves to it, in general its a cool project. if it is an encoder i am not sure how it tracks the movement. i had made an endless encoder with a cd disk which i had glued some small magnets on the back surface. i was tracking the magnets with some hall effect sensors. it was very accurate. i dissasembled it because i couldn't fit it in my way of working. i tried using my tablet as a controller but i rarely use it. i prefer the mouse or automation. in general everything confuses me at the end so my procedure is to keep the minimum possible. for vibrato i use lfos that i control with the mouse. i don't expect any real expression with electronic instruments. i am a guitar player and i have an axon midi controller. i never use it but i remember if i recorded in slow tempo each string sended its own pitch bend it sounded quite good when played in higher tempos. but in reality all these for me are too cumbersome to use, electronic synths are too complicated anyway so i just program with modulators and stuff. i don't even have a midi keyboard.


@valis
interesting stuff you are very creative
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by astroman »

In fact the brochure doesn‘t tell the story of it‘s function, but it is in fact just pitch wheel.
If you connect a synth to the app and turn the hardware wheel the knob will follow, operation range is -8192, 0, +8192.
That‘s what makes the project so simple.
The smart part of the (original) Knob is all about scaling the hand movement and the real thing is very convincing if you watch videos of a real Synclavier being tweaked.
The Synclavier Go! app doesn‘t emulate the instrument, but features the original algorithms transferred to ARM.
It sounds quite different from other synths on the tablet.
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

So if you tweek a parameter it jumps back to 0 after you release the golden knob?

I tried watching some videos but they were very boring. I like FM synthesis but anyone who jumps and screams about how marvellous it is (like here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZvDSl4KQhI ) is probably not very stable in mind (perhaps he has passed some time tweeking fm synthesizers)

In general all that stuff suffer from the basic problem. Only experts can use them and experts don't need them. New-comers can't use them.

That said FM synthesis is one of the strong points in digital synthesis but really hard to explore because of the unlimited foul spectra that lies between the interesting stuff. Kbobs does not improve the situation perhaps golden pills would suit better
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

Valis thanks for the info about the morphogenetic field I didn't know this story. Unfortunately I can't follow all your talking you use too many abbrevations
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valis
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by valis »

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask. I made a similar post in regards to my AIDA64 monitoring solutions once before (and PG-AM), and in this case am curious about current options for sound design & midi control. I used to follow midibox.org & uCAaps.de and long for modern alternatives (though many of those can still be built).
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Re: Lilliputing & Micromachines

Post by fra77x2 »

Questions about what?
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