First look at the Microchip 23S17 SPI port expander I’m looking at some ways to expand my input options on my Arduino projects. I was looking around at some ICs and I noticed that Microchip had some 16 bit port expander chips that worked with SPI and I2C so I ordered some samples. The part that I settled on was…

Using the Adafruit Atmega32u4 breakout board I picked up an Atmega breakout board from Adafruit the last time I ordered from them. I haven’t had much of a chance to use it yet other than to blink a “hello world” LED, but I wanted to make a few notes here about it to keep my memory fresh. Hopefully it helps…

Hacking the McMillen SoftStep I recently got a SoftStep foot controller from Keith McMillen Instruments and I finally got a chance to play around with the raw data from it in Max/MSP. I won’t go into too much detail here except to note some details about what data you get from this thing and how the sensors on the pads…

Network audio with NetJack part II In the last installment I was setting up Jack on different platforms, namely Mac and Windows in preparation for doing some network streaming. Jack was kicking butt locally on both platforms using ASIO and CoreAudio as the case may be. However I hate to be the bearer of bad news – when I went…

Pure Data Skratchpad I just released a first version of a Pure Data patch that I’ve been playing with called Skratchpad. The basic purpose of this patch is to enable manipulation of an audio loop using a turntable and a trigger pad. Lots of DJs are using things like the Novation Dicer to manipulate cue points and trigger samples. I…

Working with vinylcontrol~ in Pure Data In the last post I described how to get the vinylcontrol~ external compiled and installed on a Mac. If you are on Linux there is already a 32 bit binary out there for you, and if you are on Windows, good luck. Seriously though it’s not that bad, just read my tutorial on building…

Building vinylcontrol~ Pure Data external on Mac OS I just started a Pure Data project that interfaces with my turntables using Traktor Scratch timecode vinyls. In order to read the timecode data in Pure Data we need an external PD plugin object (called an external in PD parlance). There is an existing wrapper around libxwax called vinylcontrol~ (PD objects that…

State of open-source vinyl control I’ve taken another look at a few open-source DJ programs recently as a result of another audio hacker’s Mixxx plugin project. The venerable openjay.org seems to have been shut down now that Mixxx is a mature project, so I’m not sure where the definitive source for news is anymore in this space. I’ve been following…

Network audio using netjack – part 1 I’ve been playing with networked audio again after some previous unsatisfactory attempts at getting something working using pulseaudio and TransportProtocol">RTP streaming. I tried a few things in the past like using PD’s netsend~ object but nothing gave me decent results. I tried a few things this time around like Wormhole which is a…

Installing Pure Data on Ubuntu Getting PD working on Linux should be the easiest thing in the world, but I’ve found that it can be a little tedious to get just the setup that you want installed. Most of the time we want to have PD-Extended so that all of the PD externals that don’t ship with PD Vanilla are…