Wearable chronos theremin and MIDI controller by HyperGlitch

Today I’m going to present you open source DIY projects by Igor Brkic aka HyperGlitch.  You already know Igor from my Artduino workshop overview few weeks ago, because he was one of the instructors during the workshop.

Igor works as a Research Associate at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Zagreb. He enjoys hacking hardware and devices, preferably MIDI interfaces. But he’s also deeply involved into programming, linux, playing guitar, dsp, arduino…

Wearable Chronos-theremin (cc)

Weareable Chronos-theremin is based on TI Chronos watch (EZ430 edition) as a MIDI controller that runs under open source OS Linux. He created a Python script for using it (download here), and the code could be re-programmed for other use with serial devices based on accelerometar data, since the project is under GPLv3 licence.

‘The eZ430-Chronos is a highly integrated, wearable wireless development system that comes in a sports watch. It may be used as a reference platform for watch systems, a personal display for personal area networks, as a wireless sensor node for remote data collection, or simply as a watch.’ (Texas Instruments)

Ctrlr is an Arduino based MIDI footcontroller inspired by Behringer FCB-1010.

Photos: Igor Brkic (cc)

‘Complete idea was to make a device that can be connected by USB and configured by software but also that it can be connected to MIDI equipment using standard MIDI cable and configurable (at least to some level) directly on device. Pretty much only reason for putting LCD display on device was onboard configurability.’

Photo: Footboard by Igor Brkic (cc)

The whole MIDI device is consisted of an arduino, serial LCD driver + LCD display, a box and a few keys and knobs.

Hardware and software tutorial here

Scheme for Ctrlr

In addition to Ctrlr MIDI controller development, another programmer – Luc Ambry created few months ago his own standalone version based on HyperGlitch’s Ctrlr project and you can check the visuals here.