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Wireless metronome using a Photon Particle micro board that syncs to MIDI signals!

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photon-metronome

Say hello to a wireless metronome that syncs to MIDI signals!

Why?

Sometimes it's hard to hear on stage. Sound checks may be rushed, monitors may be of poor quality, or the hall itself may not be designed acoustically. When singing to a background track, timing is crucial. This wireless metronome serves to help keep people in sync—at the speed of light—by providing a visual reference (akin to its conception in Karnātik music).

Setup

The metronome works by sending MIDI signals to a small microprocessor over Wi-Fi. A Java program runs locally on the person's machine listening to the MIDI messages and sends RGB values for the LED as UDP packets through a router. After initial setup, internet itself is not required during use which makes the metronome remarkably resilient for stage use. Any simple 802.11 b/g router can provide the Wireless conduit between the machine and the LED board, making something like the 2004 Apple AirPort Express an especially elegant and portable solution.

Components include:

  • a computer, assumed to be a laptop
  • a Particle Photon Wi-Fi Microprocessor (formerly called Spark Core) as the IOT wireless LED device
  • a 802.11 b/g router connecting the two
  • software like Abelton Live or similar for generating MIDI MIDI signals
  • a virtual MIDI device for piping the MIDI signals from the DAW to the processing application, e.g. using Apple's built-in IAC driver (Inter Application Communication) part of Audio MIDI Setup in Utilities
  • a Processing script (tested on 3.3.6-3.5.3) that can run as a standalone executable that listens to the MIDI signals and sends them to the IOT device over Wi-Fi

Supported Operating Systems

The Processing IDE is able to compile the program to many operating systems:

  • linux-arm64
  • linux-armv6hf
  • linux32
  • linux64
  • macosx
  • windows32
  • windows64

However, since I have only tested on Mac OS X, published releases will be Mac only.

Also to prevent Java installation issues, all Mac releases will be bundled with Java.

Demos

2017-08-15 Visual Metronome Prototype with Ableton Live

Demo track "Ya Devi" by Sanchit Malhotra from the album Yuva Rhythms: Jagat Janani. Visit https://chykwest.com/yuvarhythms Visual Metronome Prototype with Ableton Live

Newb Epiphanies/Discoveries

Particle Board

SSDs Help Prevent Dropped Packets

Heavy project files (large number of stemmed tracks, effects, etc.) creates in high I/O to the hard drive. In such cases, UDP packets seem to be dropping on the computer side and never get sent to the device!! This results in either the click never being sent, or the signal to turn the LED back to black to not be sent, etc. Using an SSD has not yet exhibited these problems.

Particle Photon Setup With AirPort Express

Initial Setup

  • First install the Particle CLI using these instructions{:target="_blank"}
    • npm install -g particle-cli if you have Node 6 or greater already installed
    • bash <( curl -sL https://particle.io/install-cli ) to install Node and Particle automatically
  • Plug the board into the computer's USB. Brand new devices will already be flashing blue (listening mode). If device is solid cyan, push and hold setup for approx 3 seconds to go solid blue.
  • Plug Airport Express in. Internet is required for initial setup, so connect it to an actual network via Ethernet cable. LED should go from flashing yellow to solid green.
  • Connect laptop to the Airport Express network and verify internet is working
  • We'll be setting up over USB. Visit https://docs.particle.io/guide/getting-started/connect/photon/ for an overview
  • Open Terminal and type particle setup to login with your credentials, creating one if necessary
  • It should detect the device saying I have detected a Photon connected via USB. If not, double check the USB cable actually supports data and not just power! Select the detected Photon device and continue.
  • Answer Yes to Shall I have the Photon scan for available Wi-Fi networks?
  • Select the Airport Express' wireless network. Autodetect security type and enter the password.
  • Photon will now reboot. Menu screen changes to It doesn't look like your Photon has made it to the cloud yet. Once the device LED is solid cyan, select Check again to see if the Photon has connected
  • Name your photon (e.g. metronome-ninja)
  • Installer exits. Now it's time update the firmware so we don't check the internet on startup anymore.

Flashing the Firmware over USB

  • Plug the Photon via USB, first. Let it boot up (even if it has an existing program).
  • Identify the Photon's device ID by looking the serial attribute of dfu-util -l | grep --color serial
    • If it's ambiguous, unplug the device and run dfu-util -l to compare the difference
  • Confirm the device ID matches by checking particle list (case insensitive)
    • For example: $ particle list metronome-ninja [530056001951363036373538] (Photon) is offline
    • Note (Photon) is offline may show even while connected via USB if the device is not connected to the Internet
  • Enter DFU mode by pressing the Setup and Reset buttons, releasing reset, and releasing Setup once blinking yellow. See here for a video: https://docs.particle.io/tutorials/device-os/led/photon/#dfu-mode-device-firmware-upgrade-
  • Download the photon-metronome firmware from GitHub https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NaanProphet/photon-metronome/master/visualmetronome.ino
  • Compile and validate source particle compile <platform> visualmetronome.ino
  • Flash from source particle flash --usb <bin_file> where bin_file is the binary file that was just compiled
    • Alternatively use particle flash <device_name_or_id> particle.bin where device_name_or_id is either the device's name or the device's serial ID
  • That's it!

More detailed information about flashing firmware using DFU (Disk Firmware Update) mode is available here: https://docs.particle.io/support/particle-tools-faq/installing-dfu-util/#using-dfu-util

Helpful Tips

  • Use KisMac2 to detect Wi-Fi networks and ensure channels don't clash
  • Use a free Wi-Fi scanner like Angry IP Scanner or IP Scanner to view devices on the network. It may have to scan a few times before it starts detecting properly. Photon devices are under MAC Vendor of Universal Global Scientific.
  • Self-assign the laptop's IP so it never conflicts—just have to remember to change TCP settings back to DHCP afterwards. E.g. 10.0.1.1 is the base station, so setting the laptop to 10.0.1.9 will leave 2-8 for Photon devices. Default subnet mask is 255.255.255.0.

Troubleshooting

If you brick the photon:

  • Boot into DFU mode and use dfu-util method following this guide: https://docs.particle.io/faq/particle-devices/led-troubleshooting/photon/#manual-firmware-update
  • If the device is still flashing yellow after restarting, then issue the command particle update
  • If the photon_metronome program is not loading, try launching it from Terminal to see the console output (Show Package Contents > MacOS > photon_metronome)
  • If are trying to connect via DFU mode and are sure the device is working, double check the data pins in the cable are working by trying a new USB cable

Virtual MIDI Device Setup (Mac + Ableton)

  1. Open Audio MIDI Setup

  2. Under Window select Show MIDI Studio

  3. Double click on IAC Driver which is by default disabled (grey).

  4. Select Device is online to activate the virtual MIDI bus in all DAWs. Rename the device name, if you choose. Take special note of the port/bus name which is needed for The MidiBus library config later. The default is Bus 1.

  5. In Ableton Live, open Preferences. Set the Virtual MIDI Output bus to Track for sending MIDI CC signals and envelopes to the Photon metronome. Turn off the Virtual MIDI Input bus since we will not be sending signals from the Photon to the DAW.

    Note: the difference between Track and Sync is that the latter is simply the time signature-agnostic click/metronome. Sync will not allow us to map the Photon to different colors for downbeats, offbeats, etc.

Drawing MIDI Envelopes (Ableton)

  1. Open your Live Set project. If you prefer, set the window to column view (red arrow).
  2. Right click anywhere inside the main track area, and select Insert MIDI Track
  3. Double click in an empty row in the new MIDI track to create a new clip.
  4. In the panel below, click the little E to show the envelope editor.
  5. Choose the respective MIDI CC number for this track. The default config is CC 20 for downbeats (sam), 21 for regular beats, and 22 for empty beats (khali).
  6. If needed, set the length for the number of the measure for this rhythmic cycle. This is particularly helpful for longer cycles of 16 beats, where one might want a different color for beat 1 vs. beats 5, 9, and 13.
  7. Enter Draw Mode by right clicking in the envelope editor, or pressing B.
  8. Left-click in any beat subdivision to create a CC signal pulse. 16th notes generally seem to work well. If the pulses are too quick/short-lived, then the chance for packet drops is higher.
  9. Shift-click a line segment to drag the intensity up/down. The most straightforward application is to bring them to max.
  10. Option-click a point to delete an envelope keyframe.
  11. If all else fails, clear the entire envelope and start again!
  12. After the envelope is drawn, go back to the MIDI track and set the MIDI To output to the Virtual Photon MIDI device. (MIDI From can probably be set to No Input as well.)
  13. Lather, rinse, and repeat with additional MIDI tracks in the beat cycle.

Connecting Photon to the Virtual MIDI Bus

  1. Turn on the Photon by supplying it with USB power. Ensure your machine and the Photon are connected to the same wireless network.

    If the Photon is already configured, it will hold the RGB value standby.led.color (default solid white) to indicate it is connected to the Wi-Fi network it was originally programmed with.

  2. Use a program like IP Scanner or Angry IP Scanner (not sure why they're angry!) to identify the IP address(es) of the Photon metronome(s).

  3. Open config.json and specify the following properties:

    1. virtual.midi.port.name to the Device Name of from MIDI Studio (step 4)
    2. particle.device.ip.address to the comma-separated list of IPs of all Photons connected
    3. Optionally modify the RGB LED values for standby color, downbeat, etc.
    4. Optionally set use.cc.envelope.for.intensity to false for constant, highest light intensity regadless of CC intensity value (0-127).

Modifying the Processing Program

  • Install the Processing IDE brew cask install processing or visit https://processing.org/download/
  • Open src/photon_metronome/photon_metronome.pde
  • Install additional libraries by going to Sketch > Import Library... > Add Library
    • Install The MidiBus by Severin Smith
    • Install UDP by Stephane Cousot

Troubleshooting UDP Library Install

Some networks block the hypermedia UDP library download because the website is HTTP not HTTPS. (This happened while I was on Duke's WiFi.) If you are unable to visit http://ubaa.net/shared/processing/udp/ in your computer's browser, then this is likely the issue.

Workaround is to download it using a cell phone and transfer it over. In case that fails some day in the future, I've uploaded the zip under src/libs in this repo. The SHA512 checksum is saved in a sidecar text file and can be verified using shasum -c udp.zip.sha512

To install the library manually, copy the unzipped udp folder into ~/Documents/Processing/libraries/ and restart Processing.

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