0110.be logo

~ An Arduino Trigger Box

Vid: the trigger box set in recording mode via a button or a MIDI key press.

A while back I have build a trigger box. Such device can be used for various synchronisation tasks. It can be used to synchronise camera’s, capture devices and sensors. All compatible devices have a 5V TTL input, often a BNC connector. For a camera, TTL input could control the shutter time. For a sensor a TTL clock could determine the sample time or simply be registered along side an other data stream. The trigger box allows to either pass-through (or block) an incoming TTL clock. It also outputs a recording level.

There are two ways to use the trigger box. The first is by operating a manual switch to start (and later stop) a recording. When recording, the recording level output is set to 5V and the clock at the CLOCK IN is passed through to the CLOCK OUT port. The second way to set the recording state is by MIDI over USB. While a MIDI key is pressed, the recording state is high, when the key is released the state is low. The MIDI key input makes it compatible and controllable from any DAW. Both ways are shown in the video.

For practical reasons there are two microcontrollers in the device, a Teensy 3.2 and an Arduino. The Arduino is there for its 5V capabilities and is essentially a rather beefy level-shifter. The Teensy is there for the USB MIDI compatibility and controls everything.

For aesthetic reasons the trigger box has been build into a 1950s ‘Sieger portable explosive gas detector’. I did not feel too bad about gutting the original electronics since a battery leak had destroyed most of it. Also, the late WII era knobs are still unmatched for durability and tactile satisfaction.

The code running on the microcontrollers and some documentation can be found on the Trigger Box github repository.


~ Gabber - Visualizing constant-Q transform in the browser

Today I have released Gabber a bit of code to transform audio from the time domain to a constant-Q frequency domain in the browser. To be more precise it does a constant-Q non-stationary Gabor transform. The heavy-lifting is done by ‘the gaborator’, a C++ library by Andreas Gustafsson.

I have compiled the Gaborator library to WebAssembly, added some glue code to bridge the Javascript and WASM worlds, implemented a Web Audio AudioWorkletProcessor to transform audio in the background and and finally visualized the results via WebGL2.

There is a Gabber live demo below. If you press start and grant microphone access, incoming audio is transformed and plotted onto a canvas. Thanks to WebAssembly and WebGL2 this should run relatively smoothly even on less powerful devices. Please do play around with the perspective slider.



While Gabber is currently a proof of concept, with some attention the library could be used as a front end for browser based music information retrieval applications. My main goal with Gabber is to use it in educational settings to explain the properties of sound, and more concretely pitch, via spectrograms and interactive demos. Also I plan to use it in a browser based tool to extract pitch patterns from music.

The name Gabber, refers to both Dennis Gabor and an infamous, mainly Dutch style of music which was popular when I was young. More information can be found in the GitHub repository: Gabber-High resolution spectral transforms for the web.