Hi all
I purchased/had a quick play with a pro micro board and am hoping, with a little help, can get it to be a 'button presser' for me. I am arduino complete noob but have quite a bit of scripting experience.
Background:
I have a small pre cast plant that uses a phenix 10 channel controller that controls the batching of the mixture used in our manufacture. Its a linear sequence that simply 'conducts' a series of machines via various relays. Editing the sequence using the supplied phenix software is a real pain, completely linear and synchronous which makes it overly complicated and is not able to expand with the next stage of development....enter midi (and not sure why it hasnt been used as an industrial control language before??).
I have used cubase (midi sequencing program) for many years and it occurred to me the other day that it has a perfect and very mature graphical interface for sequencing not only music but the batch plant. Each channel is completely async. In other words you can have 10 'tracks' each playing an independent sequence of on off events. I originally used midi to drive light shows via a friend's custom midi>light box.
In addition to controlling channels, I can now add audio track cueing eg a voice that identifies certain directions during the batch cycle rather than a generic warning siren etc which is used at the moment. This should help in directing workers more efficiently. I also require batching cycles to be counted, timestamp and written to excel file etc so I am prototyping an eclectic setup;
- Autoit is used as a mast (host) to coordinate input and output etc via various programs (because it has winapi access to trap kepresses, host com etc and can host midiox. It calcs the stop/start midi events and writes the timestamped output to text file which is linked into excel to provide charting and reports etc.
- Cubase is used as the sequencing program but at this stage, is not controlling the hardware directly, just audio cueing etc and is the master provider of stop start events.
- midiox com object is used to trap/handle midi realtime events eg stop/start etc and pass to the mast.
- Arduino pro micro is used to 'press the button' on the phenix controller. I will separately controller the relay channels via midi as I get comfy with arduino...Rome wasnt built in a day
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Objective:
I simply want to pass arduino 'something' (ie either a midi start event or whatever is the easiest trigger) from the host (autoit) that will get it to simply close a pin and trigger the start of the phenix controller, ie replacing the manual switch and having it 'press the button' from the computer rather than a hardware switch.
I have scanned the forum and it seems that its not too hard to setup the roland midi driver to respond but there is also the opportunity to simply pipe from vbscript direct to arduino via com port.
Any suggestions where to start/best practice would be brilliant. I know the pro is performing a menial task but its important and hopefully will lead to a much larger picture.