Accelerometer to Midi

dated 8th October 2019

Current work-in-progress

The principle is to to have a number of small and lightweight devices to detect x-y-z movement using an accelerometer and to transfer these signals to a MIDI input, which can create or adjust music.

These devices may then be attached to a dancer`s hands or feet to create music from dance rather than the conventional method of a dance from music.

The following list of research areas will be expanded to individual pages on the right (child-page) column:-

Power. As each module requirement is that it is lightweight and without wires to a single battery pack, a 3v cell battery would be used. This power cell is yet to be decided.

Accelerometer. The MPU-6050 was selected as it is cheap and runs on 3.3V. The diagram above shows the connection to the ESP8266, which is an Arduino/wifi module. The ESP8266 will be used to process and transmit the xyz signals.

Processing & transmit xyz. An arduino was selected as the processing is light and simple. Since a wireless signal was required to transmit the data from the Arduino to the base station where the MIDI would be processed, the ESP8266 wifi module with an internal Arduino chip was considered as it was the smallest and lightest combination solution. However, it has not yet been decided whether wifi or bluetooth will be used. bluetooth has the advantage of being lower power due to shorter ranges and easier to pair with the base station. Each solution will be investigated, although wifi will be investigated first.

Receive xyz and process to MIDI at base station. While wifi is being been considered as the data transfer medium, any wifi connected device could be programmed to read the wifi output stream from the accelerometer device. This will be considered at a later stage.

Using wifi, the base station needs to poll multiple clients (each device) to collect the movement data. Each ESP8266 needs to provide a telnet socket (http not required) https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/48264/connecting-multiple-clients-to-a-server-in-wifi

MIDI output at base station. The device for processing the received wifi accelerometer device stream will be selected for its ability to output data to MIDI. This will be considered at a later stage.

MIDI input and control at Audio. Any MIDI device could be used and the MIDI output from the base station would need to be modified accordingly.