SomethingUnreal | DIY Printer P4: Proof-of-concept with an LED @SomethingUnreal | Uploaded 9 years ago | Updated 20 minutes ago
Part four in this series of "making of" videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.
There's still no pen, so I stuck an LED where the pen will go and made it turn on when the pen should be drawing, as a test. Then, I took a long-exposure photo while it "printed" with the LED, pointing the camera upwards slightly after it finished each row. What I ended up with was a photo of the image that it tried to print, with inverted colours and stretched a bit because I didn't move the camera at the right speed.
It can also now print bidirectionally, and it's much faster to receive the data for the next row of pixels, because they're no longer sent one at a time.
Illustrations are by とんぐ (Tongu) (Pixiv member ID: 258901) and CAFFEIN (blog: http://caffein89.blogspot.co.uk / Pixiv member ID: 13054).
Part four in this series of "making of" videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.
There's still no pen, so I stuck an LED where the pen will go and made it turn on when the pen should be drawing, as a test. Then, I took a long-exposure photo while it "printed" with the LED, pointing the camera upwards slightly after it finished each row. What I ended up with was a photo of the image that it tried to print, with inverted colours and stretched a bit because I didn't move the camera at the right speed.
It can also now print bidirectionally, and it's much faster to receive the data for the next row of pixels, because they're no longer sent one at a time.
Illustrations are by とんぐ (Tongu) (Pixiv member ID: 258901) and CAFFEIN (blog: http://caffein89.blogspot.co.uk / Pixiv member ID: 13054).
![[MIDI] Nomico - Skip! (Moetan ED) [SC-88Pro] (60FPS)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XgXM5Vhecr8/hqdefault.jpg "[MIDI] Nomico - Skip! (Moetan ED) [SC-88Pro] (60FPS)
Heres the Roland SC-88Pro synth being pushed quite hard by the power of moe (ending theme of the anime Moetan, Skip!, originally sung by Nomico, to my surprise). MIDITrails fancy 3D view is good for notes, but doesnt show any control changes, so I included a scrolling view of those, too, next to the synths display. And hey, why not 60FPS for those who can view that? =)
This MIDI took me about 5 days to make, plus a few hours of tweaking at the end. It sounded like it was nearly finished after 2 days, but the hardest stuff was still left to do at that point (I do hate struggling to transcribe barely-audible parts, but they really fill in the gaps and make it sound complete).
Firsts for me include the fast arpeggio effect (surprisingly, the 88P never complained about this), wah effect on the quiet guitar (on the right), and gratuitous use of All Sound Off whenever possible, to try to keep things running quickly enough. Also, 4 sound effects Ive never used before!
3 channels get re-used for different instruments (16 channels has never been so insufficient), but more annoyingly, the synths update speed drops really low during the chorus because of all the playing voices, making pitch-bends sound jumpy, and it took a lot of tweaking and quite some luck to get a clean recording. I kind of wonder if its just my 88P which slows down so much when many notes are playing (even if there are not many MIDI messsages), or if its simply a limitation of its CPU speed. It might just be a coincidence, but it seemed to handle it better immediately after power-up, so perhaps it becomes worse as it gets hotter. In that case, maybe I could attach a heat sink to the CPU, or just put a fan in there (I dont really want to drill holes, though). The case doesnt really get very hot, though. I kind of wish I could limit it to playing only 32 voices at once, instead of letting it struggle with 64. Lowering release times only gets you so far.
You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi/
Somehow, the fact that an anime of Moetan had been made eluded me for 8 years and I only recently discovered it. YOU MAGGOTS ARE HUFFING AND PUFFING oh wait, wrong English-teaching mahou shoujo.")
![Second Flight / Eternal Blaze, Bleeper-Style (Bawami PC speaker demo [rev 98])](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XvX-yYs3lZo/hqdefault.jpg "Second Flight / Eternal Blaze, Bleeper-Style (Bawami PC speaker demo [rev 98])
Yes, Bawami can play on the internal PC speaker! Here, you can see my MIDI player doing a few things that my old Bleeper Music Maker never could (such as pitch-bends, and working on Windows 7!).
The wonderfully detailed MIDIs played here are made by SX (http://homepage1.nifty.com/SX/). The songs are Second Flight (OP theme of Onegai☆Twins, TV ver) and Eternal Blaze (OP theme of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha As, TV ver). Here, theyre playing on the internal PC speaker - that thing that normally only beeps when the computer boots and then does nothing else. It can only play one note at once, so Bawami switches quickly between each note thats meant to be playing.
BaWaMI is a work-in-progress program of mine. Its designed to play MIDI files (or live MIDI input) on the soundcard, with instruments being made from a filtered Basic Waveform. However! I decided to add support for using the PC speaker as much as possible. For Bleeper Music Maker, MIDI support was merely an addition, but Bawami was designed for MIDI from the start. This means it has a knowledge of pitch-bends, vibrato and instrument volume envelopes, which are all put to use when it controls the PC speaker.
Also, Bawami communicates with the PC speakers timer chip on the motherboard directly and can tell it to simply start making sound and worry later about when to stop it. BMM could only tell Windows to beep for a given duration, and since it couldnt look into the future to see when it should stop, it had to repeat many short beeps, which sounded bad when only playing one note.
BaWaMI is released now! See lots of info and download it here:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog?page_id=84#bawami
MIDIs used in this demo:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/F_s_t_v2_copy/sx/one2optv.mid
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/F_s_t_v2_copy/sx/lyasoptv.mid")
![MCM Expo: Hare Hare Yukai [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZTi4F3PTMb0/hqdefault.jpg "MCM Expo: Hare Hare Yukai [HD]
Again, keeping with tradition, a group of people did the dance from the full version of the song from Haruhi at London MCM Expo (Saturday, 23rd of May 2009).
Unfortunately, I just missed the previous dance which they did, but thankfully I started recording just in time for their next dance (this one).")
![[MIDI] Futari No Honey Boy (KissxSis OAD OP) [SC-88Pro]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZxVG26tjftU/hqdefault.jpg "[MIDI] Futari No Honey Boy (KissxSis OAD OP) [SC-88Pro]
This sure was a fun one to make! And more trying to make the Sound Canvas synth sound like its speaking, yay! But unfortunately, I was pushing it so close to its limit that I actually had to cut notes at those points so that it could keep running smoothly. Its also extremely tedious to do, so I dont think Ill be making a whole song like that any time soon.
This is a MIDI I made for the Roland SC-88Pro of the opening theme to Kiss×sis OAD, originally sung by Taketatsu Ayana and Tatsumi Yuiko, written/arranged by Takahashi Nana. Despite being pretty complex and having a part that was incredibly hard to decipher beneath all the other instruments (I could only clearly make out half of one bar, and had to estimate what the rest was), this one only took me 5-6 days.
I decided to screenshot my MIDI player BaWaMI, chop it in half and re-arrange it into one long row of 16 MIDI channels at the bottom. I think this makes better use of the 16:9 video frame. Fun fact: Early versions of Bawami had the channels arranged like that, when they were narrower and didnt have those blue bars.
You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi/
I wonder if this synth is older than Ako or Riko.")
![[MIDI] You Make My Day! (Otome Wa Boku Ni Koi Shiteru OP) (SC-88Pro)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_INjLfyLVMQ/hqdefault.jpg "[MIDI] You Make My Day! (Otome Wa Boku Ni Koi Shiteru OP) (SC-88Pro)
I finally finished this MIDI for the Roland SC-88Pro synth (I abandoned it a few months ago). Gotta love those electro toms. This is the opening theme (originally performed by YURIA) to the VN 「処女はお姉さまに恋してる」.
The original song has some heavy dynamic range compression so it sounds like this MIDI is lacking somewhat if you compare them, but I couldnt actually make out any more parts than this in the original. The 88Pro has a compressor effect available, but it can only use one effect at a time, and I was already using distortion. The high-pitched sound effects on the right speaker should be faster, but the synth cant reliably update the pitch much faster than this. There was an unexpectedly tricky selection of percussive sounds and panning needed for the toms, so I ended up using 4 separate percussion channels...
You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi/")
![[Lasershow] IOSYS - Dark/Light [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aDAXab2YVXQ/hqdefault.jpg "[Lasershow] IOSYS - Dark/Light [HD]
This is the first of the 2 laser shows I made for Touhou-sai 2011. This song is by ARM of IOSYS, titled 「闇光」 (I hope my Dark/Light translation is okay).
Although this was meant to be a beam show, I made some danmaku-like patterns that cant be seen properly in the air, so I included a view of it projecting directly onto a flat surface so these can be seen easily.")
