If anyone can help me it would be greatly appreciated
I am a music composer based in Mauritius and was offered the chance to participate in a great project.
I fluent with Ableton & VCV but completely new to Arduino - never even heard of it before 2 weeks ago and have been reading a bit and watching tutorials on what it can do and it seems a great fit for the project
My issue is that I live in Mauritius so I need to order the needed gear by the end of this week to be able to receive it (which will take around 1 week or 2) & have at least 3 weeks to play with it so I can understand (at least the basics) of what I'm doing
Basically it's a sound installation where I need a distance sensor ( Modulino Distance) , a movement one (Modulino Movement) and a Light sensor which needs to translate to MIDI information that I can send to Ableton or VCV.
I saw the "Plug and make Kit" but it comes with a UNO R4 wifi, which from what I read is not the best equipped for MIDI but Leonardo is.
So my question, because I can order just once in order to get it on time and start making the preparations.
What do I need to buy?
I was thinking of getting
• Plug and Make Kitso I can get different sensors + the cables that go with them, the UNO I will use to learn more and enter the Rabbit hole later
• Arduino Leonardo (x2)
• Grove Light Sensor
will this setup work? my main concern is about the cables and connections - i saw in tutorials that people use a kind of pin cable in breadboards but I would prefer something more sturdy as people will interact with the sound installation.
I have some more questions but as a first post, this is already long enough - so if anyone is willing to help a noob - please do
You need to spend a fair amount of time analyzing and designing. NEVER do a project under time pressure until you have 10 years of full-time (2,000 hrs/yr) experience, and it will still likely fail. Buying the hardware before determining the full project scope is just throwing money away.
Since you have no experience with hardware or software, I’d suggest that you immediately have a look at Wokwi or other online simulator to play with code and connectivity, so you’re not buried when the hardware arrives.
it seems the code already exists - that is basically what I need - to have sensors emit CV that can be turned into MIDI information - VCV & Ableton, I use daily and very fluent so interconnecting them and having the MIDI messages go through MAX DSP or Touch OSC for added functionality is not an issue.
Anyway through further research and chatGPT, I found out about Grove which does sensors that connect through the Grove Base Shield V2.0 that fits the Leonardo directly - so I was thinking of using Leonardo, Grove Base Shield + Grove Sensors for a more plug and play system (no need to think about resistors, ohms, ground, etc..) which chatGPT tells me would work perfectly for the system I want but GPT is not always 100% correct so if anyone has experience with Grove Base Shield and Grove Sensors, please let me know if I am wrong
Grove - 80cm Infrared Proximity Sensor should do the trick - from the site it says "This proximity sensor takes a continuous distance reading and returns a corresponding analog voltage with a range of 10cm (4") to 80cm (30")." So I guess it should work to control Filters and other parameters like a "theremin"
I've used that distance sensor. The output is indeed analog but the voltages occur in steps just like the output from an 8 bit DAC.
I too tried to make an optical theramin with it. If you try to do a linear mapping between the output voltage and frequency you wind up with 256 disctete tones.
I think for what I want to do it should be ok - i can adapt myself and use the distance to trigger different event in MIDI - I will adapt myself to what can be done with the sensors I purchased - I bought the light sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, distance sensor, 2 potentiometers (sliding) and 2 pressure sensors (Round) - I will see how it works and create my patch around that and what is linear and what isn't. For a bit more money I can have express shipping in 2-5 days from China to Mauritius - from Italy or other European countries its very expensive for our Rupee but China is ok - so I can still see after I try to get the Grove - Ultrasonic Distance Sensor which provides a Digital output according to ChatGPT and therefore will need a bit of coding but I'll see.