Author Archives: Gan

How to swap control-m and control-j in Emacs

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Emacs often changes the behavior suddenly and drastically. Recent surprise to me was that role of ctrl-j (newline and indent) and ctrl-m (newline) switched out of the blue. I don’t understand the developer’s sense of changing user interface of a multi-decade years old software. But luckily, emacs has very powerful customization ability.

Adding this line reverts the key bindings back.
(when (fboundp 'electric-indent-mode) (electric-indent-mode -1))

I appreciate this post
http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/5939/how-to-disable-auto-indentation-of-new-lines

USB Serial Communication with PSoC Pioneer Kit

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Exchanging data with PSoC Pioneer Kit over serial communication is often useful. The kit CY8CKIT-042 has a built in USB-to-UART utility programmed in the PSoC 6LP device which is used for onboard debugger for the target PSoC 4. It is easy to use. See below.

https://www.element14.com/community/thread/23868/l/psoc-4-pioneer-kit-community-project04-usb-uart-utility?displayFullThread=true

Installed Necessary Applications

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I like OS X as a software development platform (and electronic stationery); On the other hand, it’s much better to use Windows for hardware development because of better coverage of development tools. As a compromise, I own MacBook and runs Windows under Parallels Desktop for hardware development. I have no issues with this style so far thanks to the powerful USB support by Parallels.

My Windows platform has reached disk size full at 64GB. I decided to extend the disk size and re-install everything. Here are highlights of my Windows platform:

  • Windows 10, display language = English
  • PSoC creator 3.2 for the PSoC development platform. 3.3 is installed by I am not using it yet since I saw some instability. (install image =PSoCCreatorSetup_3.2_sp1_b6175.exe)
  • Salae Logic 1.2.10 (Logic Setup 1.2.10.exe) for logic analyzer. No particular issue. Working fine with a normal installation.
  • PicoScope6.11.12 (PicoScope6_r6_11_12) for my oscilloscope PicoScope 2203. The hardware has become EOL already but it is working with this version of Oscilloscope app. Note that OS X version requires installing .NET libraries. I hate it so didn’t install on Mac.
  • Foxit Reader 7.2.8 (FoxitReader728.1124_enu_Setup.exe) for PDF reader. The version is important. Never upgrade this until FoxIt resumes support of classic toolbar mode. The latest version supports only ribbon mode and it painfully takes space on my small screen. Otherwise, this viewer is very comfortable to use. Note: Turn off the automatic upgrade functionality.
  • TeraTerm 4.91 (teraterm-4.91.exe) for terminal emulator. TeraTerm has several variations/providers for some reason. I always get confused by it. This is the one I use, for my future reference: https://ttssh2.osdn.jp/index.html.en
  • Eagle 5.12.0 It’s very old version but I keep using it because this is the version where I have commercial license (which was quite expensive). Cadsoft who were former provider of Eagle was acquired by some other company, so I’m not sure if the latest version is “better” or “improved”. I want to avoid spending extra time for researching it, so I will stay with this version as long as possible. I’m happy with the feature at this point anyway.

That is about it. I have not installed Cygwin yet. I’m waiting for Ubuntu/bash is officially supported by Windows 10.

I have archived these install images in my ‘software’ folder for any needs for recovery in future.

MIDI Receiver Module

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schematic

DSC02703

My PSoC Creator application became unstable suddenly. I could not work on software today. I’m now recovering the software.

Meanwhile, I made a MIDI receiver module instead. Developing and debugging MIDI Rx would be easier and less troublesome hopefully.

Not yet verified the behavior.

Analog3: The First Use Case

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DSC02688

One year has passed since I stopped working on Analog 3. Now it’s time to resume the development. The picture above is the first use case of Analog 3. This is a draft panel layout of the synth I want to make. The panel includes least set of parameters I want.

Many parameters on this panel has non-traditional style, like ones in VCA. I will need to revise and adjust such parameters. In order to avoid remaking hardware modules, I will control the risk by following approach:

  • Develop the synth by modifying a working complete set of synthesizer, i.e., the base platform. I will use the Analog2.0 fundamental set for it.
  • Modification is done by replacing a module.
  • New modules have analog panel.
  • Base platform keep using the existing hardware panel.

I can always verify the complete set is working by this approach.

The first task, then, is to build an Analog2.0 box.

exp() calculation for micro processors

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You frequently encounter a situation that exponential function is necessary when you work on a musical instrument project using micro processors.  Its generic implementation is slow and space consuming, so is not suitable for micro processors.  So I need to do some alternative implementations.  For those implementations, space and speed is important but accuracy may be sacrificed in many cases.

Follows are articles about fast and compact exp() implementations, for my future reference.

http://www.convict.lu/Jeunes/ultimate_stuff/exp_ln_2.htm

http://www.quinapalus.com/efunc.html

I’m currently using a table lookup approach that I implemented before for an envelope generator I prototyped before.指 This one is still a little slow and large, but it’s running in PSoC 4200 without major problem anyways.  So I’ll keep it for a while.

Memo: Maven

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Installation

How to install Maven on Windows

Maven is a Java application, so we are just fine with expanding product zip package and setting environment variables M2_HOME and JAVA_HOME and set PATH.

Creating a Maven Project

Maven in 5 Minutes

Maven in 5 seconds… dothis:

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-app -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false

Stub Synth Module for MOM Development

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MOM (Master Of Modules) manages synthesizer modules to make them work as a single musical instrument.  The main responsibilities of MOM are

  • Control patching.
  • Control parameters.
  • Organize voices.
  • (possibly) Organize modules such as device ID management.

Designing and implementing MOM and synth module data model is yet another challenge out of building CAN network.  Basically, the inter-module communication depends on CAN physical layer, but it’s a pain to dragging such a dependency during the MOM development.  I’m sure the CAN network would be quite unstable at first and I don’t want to stop and troubleshoot CAN while I’m working on MOM.

So, in order to remove dependency on CAN network, I’ll build the initial version of MOM based on TCP/IP with dummy (stub) synth modules that are purely software oriented and talk TCP/IP.  Once the MOM design is fixed, I can replace the TCP/IP driver by CAN driver later.  It will not ruin the module data model.