ShaduzLABS

Yet another MIDI-to-Gakken interface!

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:34:24 PDT

A couple of months ago, during Homework Festival I met a guy from Sofia who had a strange machine in his setup... he told me how cheap and funny it was, so I decided to order one on ebay. Last week I received my Gakken SX-150 and started searching around the net for hacks a [...]

High-accuracy 16 bit DAC for Arduino

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 02:24:27 PDT

A 16 bit DAC solution for your Arduino! The schematic is very simple, it's just the DAC (Analog Devices AD420), a few capacitors and an operational amplifier used as voltage follower in order to provide some buffering to the DAC output. The DAC is not very cheap (around 15-18$!) but it allows to obtain a good resolution in order to satisfy all your accuracy needs... I've built the circuit using a [...]

arduinOSC first release

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:54:10 PDT

arduinOSC is a library which transforms your arduino into a simple arbitrary waveform audio oscillator.
It is based upon the internal 16-bit programmable timer and generates audio using pulse width modulation (PWM) and an external low-pass filter (square waves don't even need the external filter).
I'm using a simple passive low-pass filter (see the simple schematic below), but in the ne [...]

Arduino MIDI I/O Board

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:22:33 PST

A minimal MIDI input/ouput board ready to be connected to your Arduino! The schematic is very simple, I used a single-copper-hole prototyping board to build mine, but a breadboard is also a nice alternative.
Basic MIDI output is really easy to do with Arduino, all you have to do is initialize the serial port using Serial.begin(31250), then you can send standard MIDI data using Serial.print fu [...]

Maxtor/Seagate users: read this post!

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:00:32 PST

Yesterday evening I came back from work and turned on my PC, but instead of seeing the usual windows loading screen, an horrible "Insert a bootable media" warned me that my 2-months old 500gb hard disk was somehow fucked up...
The first thing I thought was that the MBR was damaged, so I tried to boot from a Knoppix Live CD to see if there was a way to access the hard disk content, a [...]

Alcoholic MIDI shuffle

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:13:29 PST

Last night I was working on my sequencer project and, looking at the sensor I recently bought from SparkFun, I had this nasty idea... so i wired up the MQ-3 alcohol sensor, hooked a 200k trimmer to it just to calibrate the range of the measures, and voilà! The sequencer global shuffle can now be controlled using your breath alcohol content...
After a little regulation on the trimmer I [...]

A low-cost wireless Arduino

shaduz@shaduzlabs.com (Vincenzo Pacella) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:02:58 PST

Some days ago I received my first Lilypad Arduino and started to experiment with a SMD Bluetooth module i bought from Sparkfun. The connection between the BT module and the Arduino board has been described here by Leah Buechley, but instead of using a BlueSmirf Gold Board (which is based upon a Roving Networks m [...]