If you’re looking for a big project button, you can find it at Staples.
Introduced as part of their “That Was Easy” marketing campaign in 2005, the easy button is a large red button that, when pressed, says the phrase “that was easy” via a small speaker.
Its low price of $6.99 is enticing. What if instead of buying a purpose-built large button, we can repurpose an Easy Button for our projects instead?
I’ve been messing around with MIDI for my musical floppy drive project, and it was surprisingly difficult to find detailed information on how to get started with Arduino’s MIDI library. So in this post I’m going to show you, in detail, how to use this library to control anything on an Arduino using MIDI.
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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.
While MIDI is serial communication, it is a standardized protocol and is treated differently by most operating systems. But because it’s just serial data, it’s possible to “re-route” these MIDI messages to a generic serial device like an Arduino using two small pieces of software.
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.
In this post I’m going to show you how to calibrate your ambilight in Prismatik so that it matches your screen, showing proper white and truer colors! This is going to be a long post, so sit back and strap in!
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I keep getting distracted by other projects and ideas, but I wanted to post a brief update on the footwell NeoPixels project. I’ve been working on the data structures and color patterns, but today I wanted to cover something simpler.
For the time being I’m not planning on changing the color of the tC’s interior lighting, which is a nice burnt orange. I’ve toyed back and forth with the idea of replacing the tC’s cubby light and adding a few lights to the cupholders, which on a default setting should match the rest of the lighting. This gives us today’s problem: how do we match the NeoPixel’s color with the other LEDs?
Although Adafruit has an excellent guide on getting started, I thought I would include a short post on using their library for RGB or RGBW strips. This already assumes you’ve got your strip hooked up to an Arduino and have successfully run one of the library’s example sketches. If not, read up on Adafruit’s basic connections tutorial.