sk-piano

Arduino code for controlling piano and lights

Simulator Setup

In order to run the simulator you need a few things set up:

• ruby + ruby gems
• ruby gem: eventmachine (install: sudo gem install eventmachine)
• ruby gem: em-websocket (install: sudo gem install em-websocket)
• gcc/g++ (on mac, this means xcode + command line tools)

To run it, run simulator/websockets_server.rb from the simulator directory, then browse to simulator/sim.html in Chrome. (You probably need Chrome, and a recent version, due to the simulator's use of web sockets) Every time you reload the page it will re-run beaglebone/piano (and should kill that process when you browse away from the page).

Using the simulator

• Right now, the whole strip is shown as one long line.
• Keys are Z, X, ..., >, ? for C3 through E4; Q, W, ..., [, ] for F4 through C6, with keys above for sharps (e.g. "S" is C#3)
• If the keys seem weird I might've (umm, accidentally?) checked it in to use dvorak key bindings; fix sim.js to use "key_mapping_reverse_qwerty" instead of the dvorak one.
• ENTER is A0 (mostly for switching visualizers using MasterVisualizer)

Compiling

• You should be able to just run "make" in the beaglebone/ subdir.
• "make -j && ../simulator/websockets_server.rb" is your friend.

(Very Rough) Getting Started Guide

• main.cpp has a piano() method where visualizers are instantiated, modify this to change which visualizers are active.
• MasterVisualizer holds a bunch of other visualizers and cycles through them when A0 (the leftmost key on the keyboard, ENTER in the simulator) is pressed.
• The most basic visualizers just respond to onKeyDown/onKeyUp events as well as a "onPassFinished" event which gets called once per piano read / render cycle. See SimpleVisualizer for an example of how to code these.
• There's some light infrastructure for "Particle"-based visualizers which operate generally by spawning new particles sometimes and those particles get "aged" (where they can update any of their state, including position / color in response to time) and eventually the particles decide they have died. See SimpleParticleVisualizer for an example of this.
• Even though the websockets_server.rb script will run a new instance of the piano executable every time a page is loaded, don't forget you still have to compile your code when you change something :)
• See PianoLocations.h for information about what lights are where. We got the majority of them mapped but not all; if you need other positions then maybe add a guess in there (with a comment saying to check it) and we can fix it up when we get to the playa.
• LogicalLightStrip lets you take a subset of the full light strip and use it like it's just a smaller light strip, to make it easier to work with different regions of the piano.
• CompositeVisualizer combines a handful of other visualizers and passes all events through to each of them in order. Used in combination with the LogicalLightStrip abstraction, you can have combine different visualizations over different regions of the piano.

Useful Utility Classes

• Check out Colors.h for useful things dealing with colors.
• Check out Util.h for some easy utils for timestamps and logging.