200th Post!

This is the 200th post on this blog!

As I’ve recently celebrated 1 year of posts, rather than a new project for this occasion, I thought it might be interesting to look back over some of the past 199 posts and pull out a few of my favourites.

A good number of posts have been playing with the characteristic square-wave sounds of the Arduino tone() function from those first few experiments, but without a doubt my favourite was managing to get 12-note polyphony on a single Arduino via careful use of one of the ATmega328’s timers.  This post was featured on Hackaday and some of the comments there led me to a further series of learning and experiments in the world of Top Octave Generation.

Another major strand of projects use the Mozzi synthesis library for Arduino.  There are too many posts to list here, but I’ve still really only just scratched the surface of the art of the possible.  Now that I have my “universal synth panel” I’m planning to try out a number of the other Mozzi related projects from around the Internet and maybe have a few more experiments of my own too.  I was particularly pleased to get Mozzi up and running on SAMD based boards and look forward to some more experiments on these nice 32-bit platforms.

Many of the projects so far have just used the simplest of output methods with the Arduino – either direct square wave output or a PWM audio signal (with a little hardware filtering).  One area I’ve tinkered with a little but feel there is still more to explore is the use of an external digital to analogue converter (DAC).  I’ve had projects using a MCP4725 and a home-made R2R DAC so far, but there are many other options here for future experiments, especially in the more general areas of direct digital synthesis and wavetable generation.

It hasn’t all been about sound generation.  I’ve always had a soft spot for LEDs and have particularly enjoyed some of the various LED visualisations from a range of hardware addons – the LOL Shield is an old favourite, but also a simple LED matrix and LED “bars” – and I’ve looked at OLED and TFT displays as well.

I’ve tinkered a little with some synth modules using the Raspberry PI with both MT-32 Pi and Zynthian, but this really hasn’t gone much beyond the very basics so there is still enormous potential here.

I’ve also dallied with touch interfaces, light control, piezo inputs,  and percussion, although I must admit I retain a soft spot for my Arduino Relay Bolero. I’ve also now used a number of add-on boards, such as those based on the VS1003 and VS1053, and built or used quite a few different MIDI interfaces.

And it hasn’t all been Arduino.  So far, I’ve touched on Arduino Uno, Nano, Pro Mini, Pro Mega; Wemos D1 Mini; Adafruit Feature, Trinket and ItsyBitsy; Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico; and a range boards designed for education, learning or music, such as the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, the BBC Microbit, and the Bare Conductive Touchboard.

I’ve also had a brief diversion into recycling old keyboards, and other things, into MIDI controllers and created a number of other MIDI controllers and sequencers.

In an attempt to bring some order to the chaos of those 199 posts, I’ve started a Techniques page alongside my general Projects pages and have tried to maintain a relatively useful set of categories and tags (see the right-hand column on every page).

But of course, no look back would be complete without a note about the Lo-Fi Orchestra.  What started as a simple excuse to bring some of the projects together has now taken on a bit of a life of its own.  Some of my favourites so far are definitely the following:

• Ravel’s Bolero – arguably the first “major work” performed by the Lo-Fi Orchestra, I’m still really pleased with having a relay clicking out that famous rhythm for over 14 minutes.
• The Washington Post and The Liberty Bell – these just sound so relentlessly “jolly”.  They remind me of fairground organs and it’s hard to listen to these and not smile.
• Theme from The Black Hole, closely followed by the themes from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Good Omens – these are all great theme tunes and I think seem to work quite well in Lo-Fi Arduino tones.
• Sky Toccata – this is still the best demonstration of the relay and servo “drumkit” in action I have, I think.
• Jeff Wayne’s musical version of the War of the Worlds – Part 1 and Part 2 – these largely seem to have gone unnoticed on YouTube and my blog, but I was quite pleased to have got all the main tunes from the whole show into two 15 minute parts.
• But of course, pride of place still goes to my Lo-Fi version of Holst’s Planets Suite.  So far you can hear Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn.  One day I’ll try and finish it and do Uranus and Neptune.

Finally I ought to mention the 1812 Overture Finale which was my way of celebrating getting to 100 blog posts!  And here we are, now at 200.  Maybe if I make it to 300, I should do the rest of the overture…

Kevin