2019-05-03 (F) Weekly Summary

Since I am making a MIDI controller, all the neat controllers pop out and this one had variety and it looked fascinating. There was a laser harp, rotary potentiometers, linear potentiometers, arcade buttons, and a touch piano in a laser cut enclosure.

This feature started with an uncommon, even silly, question. Folks kept asking these magnet retailers if magnets were a suitable replacement for laundry detergent. Most people would instantly dismiss the question but testing showed evidence that detergent cleaned better and magnets had no more effect than a control batch. The important thing is that citizen scientists created a repeatable process and produced data rather than dismissing the question.

MIDI input kept moving forward I added an optocoupler circuit based on the examples I found online. Instead of an ordinary diode before the coupler, an LED was swapped in its place. In order to test everything, the components were added dead-bug style where the parts were allowed to hang in free-space.
Dead-bug optocoupler

It seemed like the optocoupler circuit worked well so it was installed neatly on the controller breakout board. I was worried that there might be some issues with height clearance, but nothing was close to interfering. Testing showed that all incoming data was nonsense.
Optocoupler properly installed

Data was not decoding properly so the optocoupler was removed. When the data was seen at the bit level nothing made sense. It was supposed to be ascending note by note but it did not change that way. The first three bits in the image below, where the note was transmitted, were inverted. As soon as the zeros and ones were imagined as their opposite, they were incrementing bit by bit.
Inverted bits

The optocoupler circuit inverted the incoming bits, like a NOT gate, so it had to be added back to the project. This time the circuitry was added to a separate board which connected with screw terminals so it could be swapped in the future if necessary.
Incoming MIDI interface board

The rest of the summary posts have been arranged by date.

First time here?

Completed projects from year 1
Completed projects from year 2
Completed projects from year 3
Completed projects from year 4
Completed projects from year 5
Completed projects from year 6

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