greetings viewers you joined me amid some tinkering i've just finished uh soldering up
this five pin din connector on a bit of cable here which is uh wired up as a midi connector
um and i've got it all set up to this little nano here based on a schematic that i found online and
i am going to try and get this guy to do a little bit of midi controlling not creating notes but
controlling of parameters on this uh guitar pod uh you may remember it from a video a
couple months ago when i picked it up at a at a thrift store i'll put a link to that up there
anyway there's only it is a five pin connector but there's only three pins that are actually in
use and i have got well down here i've got the transmit pin connected to what is that
oh to the uh to the uart transmit and the receive pin i just got pulled high just
because i'm not using it because it doesn't need it just put the connector back together and uh
yeah let's get some software going and see what i can do with this uh you may also notice that
i got a single potentiometer connected there and for the experiments that i am intending
for now anyway that's all i need in the future i may add more to it but
i guess i should what so what i'm hoping to do with this is basically control one of the
functions on that pod one of the adjustments with a foot pedal um which will drive the potentiometer
through its range and send a range of command values out to the pod why does that look goofy
that didn't go together properly ah talking and not thinking while i'm doing things here
okay so that will just plug into the midi input on the pod and uh yeah i will hook up the arduino
nano to the computer and throw some quick software in it and here is that software that i've come up
with this is again just stripped straight out of a demo uh the demo that comes with the midi library
i have stripped out anything that i don't need because i just want a single expression pedal
uh which is being controlled by the analog input a0 of my uh of my arduino there almost everything
in here is pretty much straight out of the the demo including variable names and stuff
so it's setting up three different variables um i have gone into the manual for the pod
and pulled out the interesting looking variables what i'm hoping to use it for is a wah pedal like
i think i mentioned but uh i'm going to start off just with uh with the generic pedal uh which is
control number one and i think that will be wah in most cases although i can just force it to be
we'll see and i set up a channel um midi can have up to 16 different channels happening on the same
wire i'm just using channel one and it doesn't really matter you just have to have your device
at both ends of the communication path set to use the same one the midi begin using the library
pin mode yeah standard arduino stuff so then in the loop we read the pedal
we scale it because the maximum value you can have for a midi value is 127
and then it uses the arduino constrain command which i'm not all that familiar with but
apparently it just keeps the variable value within a certain set range so in this case it will make
sure that the range is between 0 and 127 which it should be anyway because of the mapping but
i don't know i am no expert in this software stuff and this like i said it's just straight out of the
menu the demo and this bit as far as i can tell just decides if your value is 126 it forces it to
be 127. i'm not sure quite why it's doing that but apparently whoever wrote that demo thought it was
a good idea then it checks to see if the previous value is different from the new value and if it is
then it makes them equal and then it sends this midi scent control change that's the one that
took me the longest to look up because almost all of the arduino midi stuff that i was able to find
was talking about making notes or receiving notes not doing control changes so this was uh this was
a little bit of exploration for me actually quite a bit so it sends three uh parameters it sends the
cc which is the control code or the control number which we got set up there it sends the
value which is comes out of this little bit here and then it sends the channel which is channel one
you can send a whole bunch to a whole bunch of different channels simultaneously
you can send a bunch of different values and stuff at the same time
midi is fairly quick and it's designed to happen in real time
and then there's just a little delay because there was in the demo and it goes back through it again
so this is uh if you wanted to do notes which is not what i'm doing but if you wanted to
here's a demo sketch for that and there's a lot more of those around
basically all the setup stuff midi begin i've stripped out some of the stuff from the demo
just to make it even simpler you send a note on it's note number 42 you send velocity or
how hard you're hitting the piano key or how hard you're strumming the guitar string
in this case 127 or maximum on channel one wait a second note off again same note number 42
the velocity that you are stopping the note in this case zero i don't know uh
again i'm not playing with this for that purpose and then channel one and then it
just loops so that's just a super basic way to do uh to get this thing to generate notes
and again it's just sending data the device that's receiving the midi signals this midi data
has to actually create a noise out of it midi itself doesn't create noises it needs a box or
computer or something to actually create those noises but that's not what we're doing today
okay i got the pod powered on let's plug it output in here and
okay
so right now this is set up as pedal one
which as far as i can tell just from my tinkering around here affects whatever
the main variable of any of these effects is so right now i got it set to flanger
you can sort of hear it affecting it as i tweak that let's go to a tremelo maybe
you can hear as i adjust it the
tremolo speed changes
uh what else here
but that's not what i wanted i mean that's cool and all and that's useful but that's
not the effect that i'm going for so i'm just going to go back into the software
and i am going to comment that out
and make this into the wah pedal because that's what i wanted it to be and now
there's that wah effect
so that is the basic coolness that i want now i could put a bunch more potentiometers on there
and control a bunch of different things um the volume the reverb any of these things that i
wanted basically any of the knobs that are on here and several that don't show up on top
i could also put foot switches on there to turn on and off of various things but for now that's
not that's way beyond where i want to go so the next step involves a bunch of 3d printing this
this and the little gear inside there represents uh about a week of [ __ ] around with printing
and failed prints and stuff like that to create basically a pedal so this piece has a little gear
rack on it there is attach the potentiometer which i'm not going to take back out because it's glued
in there attached to the potentiometer is a little gear that that rack will run on
and uh yes that's rough i had to print it that way up with uh with the supports and they didn't come
off very well anyways i'll jam this pivot in here it should probably be something a little bit more
substantial than just a skewer but so there you can see that that rack controls the potentiometer
but you can also hear i think that the gears are slipping but when i hold that in there it rotates
it so another problem with this model now this this model is just one that i found online um
and it looked like it would do it and after like i said about a week [ __ ] around with
printing it including this part was about a 10 hour print this part was about a six hour print
um and i had to cut this into two pieces this this piece down here was uh about two and a half more
hours and then glue it together and stuff i had to cut it because it won't fit on my ender because
size anyways that all aside um then i find out that this thing slips on here because
this isn't just well enough supported which sucks because this looks
like a legitimate thing and it's it'll actually hold me stepping on it too but
that's kind of useless and the other problem that i found with this even when it is meshing properly
that rack and pinion only rotates the pot about 90 or 100 degrees and you don't get
the full range of noises with only that not sure whether you could tell when i was cranking this
pot but i was going through the full 300 and whatever degrees of rotation that it does so
right now i'm at a bit of a standstill i'm not sure
if i'm going to find another 3d printing project and spend another week printing stuff
there is one other one that looks kind of interesting but i'm not sure yet
the other option i suppose i could build something mechanically just with
wood and bits of metal and whatnot um and then print out a gt2 timing belt pulley like this one
only with a smaller shaft so it'll fit on potentiometer and do some kind of
weirdness with that i'm not sure yet has anyone else gone down this road uh what would you
suggest i'm part of me is leaning towards the other 3d printed solution part of me wants to
go with more of a hardware uh solution part of me wants to spend the summer scouring yard sales and
thrift stores to try and find just a used cheap volume pedal which is essentially mechanically
the same thing as this only you know not as cheesy and has a potentiometer in there in that
i don't know um mechanical design isn't my strong suit what do you think uh
do you guys have any uh any other ideas have you seen variants on this theme that
would be cool especially the mechanical bit i guess the electronic bits easy anyways uh
thanks for watching i'd love to hear your suggestions down below i'll talk to you later
oh in case anybody's wondering this is bearing a barrel maple nut brown ale from
handsome lead brewing in winnipeg new brewery pretty nice