Ways to integrate SC w/ a µ-controller?

Questions
1

Hi,
if it’s not MIDI, what’s a good way to interface a micro-controller with SC when latency is an issue?

Thanks, Michael.

2

Can you give a little more detailed explanation of what you’re trying to do?

3

e.g. designing & building a musical controller to replace a std midi controller and avoiding the MIDI route and starting from scratch. OSC? Something proprietary?

4

OSC is the most straightforward if your device has ethernet / wireless, and is something in the ballpark of a raspberry/teensy/etc. There are straightforward OSC libraries in common programming languages for this. If networking isn’t an option, or OSC is too heavy-weiggt for your chip, SC does serial communication as well.

Monome has an open source serial-to-osc driver (https://github.com/monome/serialosc) that connects easily to supercollider - it might be possible to re-use some of that to make the serial communication easier on the computer side of things. You’d have to be sending serial data that matched the expectations of the driver.

5

right - thanks for the monome pointer!
I’m asking because I gathered that HID had some significant progress, if that’s of any use in this case.

6

latency is an issue - so an IP-stack might be a little too heavy on an AVR-type chip.
I’d be avoiding MIDI because of resolution and latency (part of my current setup needs the 31.25kbps serial connection, not just USB, alas)

7

What are you using as a controller?
Arduino or something else?

best,

prko

8

HID in SuperCollider should work well on all platforms, and is super flexible and powerful. I’m not sure how difficult it is on the device side to send HID messages over serial, but it would definitely make things much easier on the host side to process them.

9

that’s t.b.d. - blank sheet of paper here and spinning ideas.
currently the controllers are a Döpfer-R2M ribbon controller (DIN-connections - yuk!) and a NanoKontrol 2.

10

but that would involve serial via USB, Scott, no?

11

I also was considering wireless connections like ZigBee or Bluetooth.
But that’s potentially more hassle than I want to deal with on stage one.

12

In 2014, I researched wireless connection and tested Arduino with ethernet shield and with wireless shield as well as Arduino Yún, Raspberry Pie, ZigBee etc. At that time x-osc was the simplest way to do it.
http://x-io.co.uk/x-osc/
At that time, I noticed Bluetooth works within very short distance.

13

In 2014, I researched wireless connection and tested Arduino with ethernet shield and with wireless shield as well as Arduino Yún, Raspberry Pie, ZigBee etc. At that time x-osc was the simplest way to do it.
x-OSC – x-io Technologies

Thanks for this pointer - looks like quite a time-saver to me.
Alas x-io hasn’t been active for quite a while, as the website, fb etc. would suggest.

At that time, I noticed Bluetooth works within very short distance.

yeah, I’m not sure about Bluetooth.
It may be a bit more secure to use it, compared to Wi-Fi but if it’s connection is that sound has to be explored.
And on stage I need to on the safe side.

14

Hi,

Eli Fieldsteel has a very nice (video) tutorial on using an Arduino w/ SC to control a synth-param via a photo-diode over the serial bus/usb. It looks like it’s very responsive (regarding latency). Maybe you can go somewhere from here…

Thomas

15

Thanks for the pointer! I got to know Eli’s great series when he started it back then, but got disconnected and wasn’t aware of this tutorial.

1 Like
16

I made a controller a year and a half ago using an Arduino and serial communication over USB (using it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FySY3jLss30&index=4&list=PLETkFzIGMRb7NsB2Vgx81asUhDQgkF3Ke). The code is a bit of a mess atm, but I can send it to you if you’re interested.

If you want a wireless controller this might be interesting: http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2014/nime2014_386.pdf