Dorkbot

A dorkbot is a meeting of people who enjoy doing strange things with electricity. It happens in cities all over the world with different frequencies, sometimes once a month, sometimes less often (depends on the geekiness of the people in the city, I assume).

So I went to my local Dorkbot last Friday. It had been almost 2 years since my last time (I sound like an AA guy). My last time was THIS time, when I actually became an spontaneous presenter of the work I had done in the "circuit bending" course I had attended to. Since then it became very hard for me to attend, if I was in the city I was not available at the time of the dorkbot and viceversa, but last Friday I had no excuse to miss it.

The agenda was the following:

• "MIDI for dummies"
• "MIDI for pros: DIY contoller scracth, Contrologic AP"
• "Rompetechos: una plataforma aérea abierta"

The Midi for dummies showed how to use arduino to send midi signals to ableton live. There is a lot of info on this topic here (in Spanish, sorry) (I got this link from the dorkbot mailing list, thanks again). UPDATE: similar thing but in english here. It was very interesting to find out there is a driver to convert any serial signal to midi, making it very easy to implement midi over USB with arduino... this actually triggered some ideas in my mind (which is the whole purpose of the dorkbots, IMHO).

The Midi for pros was kind of disappointing. A guy had made a platform which was very, very, very similar to what can be done with MidiBox, but he had done it from scratch, only using MidiBox as a reference. He showed two great midi controllers, I have to admit that, but I did not see anything new in them... it seemed to be what you can do with Midibox. Maybe the scratch wheel he showed can not be done with midibox, but that is something that I am not really intrigued with...

I left after the "Midi for pros" presentation, so I can not tell about the remaining presentation, sorry... since all the music stuff was done and I was starting to get hungry, I decided to leave, although it did seem to be an interesting presentation (check it out here).

If you want to to find if there is a dorkbot in a city near you or you want to start a dorkbot in your city click here.

If you live in Madrid, check out the local dorkbot here. Since that webpage is not updated very often, make sure you subscribe to the announce mailing list and the "discussions" mailing list.

Arduinome/Monome + Polygome + Ableton Live, instructions and video

I am going to explain in this post how to run Arduinome/Monome with Polygome triggering sounds from Ableton Live in a PC with Windows Vista (it should be quite easy to translate these instructions to any other midi sequencer or similar OS). Polygome is IMO one of the coolest apps for monome.

I am assuming you have already installed your monome and now all the basics about it (monomeserial, setting the right prefix, etc...).

First thing you need to do is to install Midi Yoke. At the time of writing this post, there was no Vista version for Midi Yoke, but the XP/NT version happens to work if you disable Windows Vista User account control (Control Panel=>User Accounts=>Disable User account control). You need to disable the user account control both when installing Midi Yoke and when using it. If anyone knows an alternative for Midi Yoke that works with Vista, please let me know.

Once Midi Yoke is installed, open Ableton Live "Midi Sync" configurations (in options=>preferences) and Enable the "track" and "Sync" from "In From Midi Yoke: 1" and from "Out To Midi Yoke: 2". Add your synth of choice to a Midi channel and arm it. Press the Play button (this is necessary to generate the sync clock).

In Polygome:

1. Select "Out To Midi Yoke 1" as midi output destination
2. Select in the clock options "beat clock" as clock source.
3. Disable the internal clock
4. Set the "Send beat clock to" to "Out To Midi Yoke 1"
5. Set the "Receive beat clock from" to "In From Midi Yoke 2"

Pressing any Monome button should trigger the predefined patterns and start making sounds.

Here is a video I made using Polygome:



The drum sounds are the same I used for my AVR synth demo here. The synth sound is one of the synths available in Ableton Live. Eveything was configured as explained above. Sorry about the poor video and audio quality (and my lack of skills with Monome, I need to practice more).

More arduinome stuff here