Since I’m experimenting with increasing Adalight framerate, the first step was to try driving the Arduino Nano with a faster serial baud rate.
Unfortunately, Prismatik only supports three baud rates: 9600, 57600, and 115200. But after talking with Patrick Siegler, he pointed out a way to use your own custom baud rate for Adalight or Ardulight devices.
One of my first thoughts on how to improve Moppy was to drive it directly via MIDI. At the moment, the format of serial messages sent to the drive controller is proprietary and requires using the “MoppyDesk” application on your PC to convert MIDI notes into playable pins and wave periods.
What if we can skip the PC altogether and simply plug a MIDI cable into the floppy drive controller? The goal of this experiment is just to see if this is feasible.
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As cool as I think ambilights are, using Adalight with my DIY setup has one major limitation: framerate.
Video technology works on a principle caused persistence of vision, which means that our brains still “see” an image briefly after it’s taken away. If you replace the images quickly enough, our brains interpolate the differences between them and we get an illusion of motion.
With enough ingenuity, you can turn just about anything into a musical instrument. A few years ago, some inspired makers did just that using floppy drives. By manipulating the drive’s read-head motor, you can produce different pitches and therefore play music!
After doing a bit of research this seemed surprisingly simple, so I thought I would take a crack at it.
Note: This project is current a work in progress. This page is likely to change as I progress. Overview The goal of this project is to build a set of “musical” floppy disk drives. That is, to be able to use a floppy disk drive as an instrument that plays Read more…
We’re done! The ambilight is in place behind my monitor and has been running great. To finish up, I wanted to reflect a bit on what I learned and talk about where to go from here.
Project complete! The LEDs are in place, the code is done, the PCB is built, and everything is installed and running. So what is there left to do? Shoot some videos of everything in action!
In all of these videos, the ambilight is generating colors in real time based on the monitor’s image. The monitor image is as-filmed and is not superimposed.
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I’ve previously mentioned that I was initially using this code by James Bruce to drive the ambilight. While I was waiting for the circuit board components to arrive, I thought I would take some time to expand on his work, fix some bugs, and add a few features I thought Read more…