tractor pull for Palm OS devices
Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Say that ten times fast! Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO. Tractor Pull is an eight widget MIDI controller controller with addressable LFO.
Based on a design by Noah Vawter, it uses a Palm Pilot (any model, although the CoPilot emulator version seems to disapprove of it...) and a MIDI interface. MIDI interface!?!? That's right. You have three options:
- Geoff Smith's interface. Super neat design (although watch those LED polarities!) and reliable.
- This guy's interface. (scroll down for the text.) Looks kinda shady but it should work, and is way cheap.
- Pilot -> Serial Port -> homebrew your own program that takes serial bytes from COMwhatever and putts them along your computer's MIDI. Can't exactly take that on stage, but it works.
Tractor Pull is a work in progress! Here are the specs, based on some late night calculations involving the number 31250 (MIDI baud!) and .005 seconds (minimum event wait time for the Pilot's architechture given checking for other events!)
- Each controller widget has a range of whatever->whatever, you pick. Usually this'll be 0-127. However, the resolution of the Pilot's screen/digitizer limits actual touch resolution to 90 pixels. That means that unless you're subatomic, you can't hang with MIDI controller values such as 4 or 17. But 1,2,3,5,6, etc will work fine.
- You choose which controller # each widget goes out to. In the future it can send SYSEX, note on, whatever. For now just controllers.
- The LFO part:
- Each widget or all of them or only four can be set to go 'auto.' You do this by hitting that top icon for the one you want. The slider will then go gray like an old dog and run around chasing its tail in three flavors: Sin, Square or Saw.
- The LFO frequency (how many times a second it goes from rangelo back to rangelo again) it set per slider. You can have one slider going at 10, one at 20, one at 5 for some crazy synced noises.
- The current max LFO frequency is 20hz. That corresponds to a cycle every 10 "pilot cycles." That means only 10 interpolated values between low point, high point and low point again. The math works like so: 20 hz is once every 50 milliseconds. Pilot does its work on the 5ms, which gives it 10 tries to get from lo to hi to lo again. That's it. So I'm setting the max LFO freq at 20. It could go higher without complaint from the Dragonball, but it's pointless.
- It saves all the options & junk in the Prefs database, which you can even Hotsync if you felt like it. I doubt you do. So you can play solitaire and come back and it'll still have the monkeys running at the same place you put them last time.
So that's it for now. The UI works like a breeze, it's all bitmaps! Imagine that-- no button up/down overhead.
Tractor Pull is being developed by Brian Whitman/CSV and uses the excellent PilotMag for an IDE and gcc for the compiler.
You also need to check out Handheld-music. There's lots of stuff happening.