Side project: learning Processing

As a side project, I thought it would be useful to learn Processing at this point. The goal of the main project, if you remember, is to be able to connect all devices, including computers, to the instruments and midi interfaces.

I chose to use Processing (www.processing.org) to control how the computer(s) communicate with the rest of the equipment. Processing is very similar to the lanquage used by the Arduino (or vice-versa). It allows for faily easy programming of drawing application, and will understand keyboard and mouse interfaces. It can read and write to the USB port, hence allowing communications to and from midi equipement and the Arduino board.

While doing research on examples explaining the way to interface with the Arduino, I stumbled on a discussion thread in a forum that let me to an example showing how to use Processing to generate images from a midi input. It can be found on Maxime Beauchemin’s site at mistercrunch.blogspot.com.

So, using Maxime’s code, I tested the interface of my midi keyboard to the Mac. It worked great. I then recorded some keyboard playing and, using Logic, played it back through the code to the screen. The results can be seen on Youtube.

The code is available through Maxime’s site and I will post mine soon.


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