Yes, another update! It’s time to continue with the project, we will try to post more updates and get something going!
Edt-Pedal
First thing first; the Edt-Pedal. If you take a look at our Pivotal Tracker, you can read that the Edt-Pedal will make it possible to switch between ‘presets’ for the whole Edt-2000 system. These presets will be used to switch functionality of the Edt-Trak and other components on the fly, because you would want multiple different types of control from a single device.
We choose to buy a pre-made guitar pedal (Digitech FS3X), as it already is in a sturdy enclosure and is made to be used on stage. A quick Google search gave us the wiring scheme, which we confirmed by opening it as soon as it arrived (it had to happen :)).
As we kind of finished the flightcase, it was time to put everything together and place in on the 19 inch plate. This took a saturday morning and some tiewraps and soldering… Pictures!:
We used a piece of old network cable to connect the Arduino shield to the 6.5 mm jack plug, the wiring scheme is in the Github repository. If there are any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!
It’s still in a prototype phase, but you get the idea. Somewhere in the future we will redo everything a bit more neat, for now i t should just work…
After a morning of DIY, this is your ‘product’. Ready to go on the road! Kind of..
As you might have noticed, we used the same Arduino as the Edt-Trak; we had to hack the code a little to send Edt-Pedal messages when a button is pressed. There is also some code to provide ‘debouncing’. Also, if you hold the button down, it triggers the serialPrint every X ms.
The Processing sketch we used for the Edt-Trak is also tweaked a little to detect Pedal/Trak messages and send the correct OSC messages. This is very important; the Edt-Cetera/Preset system doesn’t know a thing about how the values are read; only that it receives /Pedal 1. We can swap sensors, use a different pedal, etc. Separation of concerns!
As always, the full code is available on Github, please feel free to try.
MaxMSP - Edt-Cetera
Now that we receive OSC messages, we can start with creating some logic to switch between presets in MaxMSP. After some trial and error (MaxMSP is still a complex program to work with) we created the following patch:
We try to keep every component in it’s own patch, so that we can easily use it in other patches as a standalone object. That’s what you see in the Edt-Preset logic:
This patch is a bit more complex; you see the Edt-Pedal coming in at the top, which increments or decrements the counter for the selected preset. That in turn controls a switch that routes the OSC messages (4th output of the Edt-Pedal) to one of the 10 outputs. There is also a ‘RESET’, which sends a bang every time a preset is changed or the MODE button is pressed. This gives a patch the oppurtunity to stop output when a preset is deselected; it could for instance stop playing a tone or turn of a light. For example, the Edt-Trak resets it’s values to 0 when a RESET is received.
The rest of the patch is mostly used to switch off OSC output when a preset is switched; only when you actively turn on the preset, it starts doing something. The extra OSC-route is to quickly select a preset, it will also directly activate a preset by sending a 1 to open the gate. (if this is unclear, once we have it tested a bit more we will make a video)
One final nice gimmick; MaxMSP makes it really easy to send out OSC messages as well to anything that can receive it. To display the currently selected preset, a simple TouchOSC page was made that can receive numbers and display this as feedback.
And finally, a video of the Edt-Pedal with feedback display on a Nexus 5X running TouchOSC.
Next step is to start experimenting with sound control, as we now also have a bit more time the coming weeks, so stay tuned :)