
Building a Eurorack Mechanical Sequencer [video] - michael_forrest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45-4xLrRMqg
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michael_forrest
I like passive engineering - allowing behaviour to emerge naturally rather
than forcing it with reams of conditional code or complex mechanisms. This is
why I am quite pleased with how this project turned out. Use the right
architecture and you hardly need any code!

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pmoriarty
Anyone interested in this sort of thing would probably enjoy having a look at
the Bastl brand Eurorack modules, which allow sensors, solenoids, and motors
to be hooked up in directly to your Eurorack system, without bothering with
intermediaries like the Arduino and whatnot.[1][2][3][4][5]

Also of interest may be just about any of the cute, quirky, Rube-Goldberg-like
creations from Gieskes[6]: [7][8][9][10][11]

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybopzDfrZ08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybopzDfrZ08)

[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sA_IcICKxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sA_IcICKxU)

[3] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpRYWuRCdLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpRYWuRCdLw)

[4] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53J1hEXsovg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53J1hEXsovg)

[5] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFX4WeXa21k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFX4WeXa21k)

[6] - [http://www.gieskes.nl/](http://www.gieskes.nl/)

[7] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf_rmr5Arbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf_rmr5Arbs)

[8] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diix7VTdwdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diix7VTdwdM)

[9] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsPBkBx3YpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsPBkBx3YpA)

[10] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTeNfms0lX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTeNfms0lX4)

[11] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Laj57aAuZKw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Laj57aAuZKw)

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pavel_lishin
This is very neat, but this video feels very much "draw the rest of the owl"
to me.

Were there supposed to be links, e.g., to that website explaining how to drive
stepper motors?

~~~
scarecrowbob
Well, a lot of the the things like how to drive a stepper motor or how to
program a microcontroller are pretty easy to find on the net-- there's a lot
of documentation.

In this video, I think that the author did a pretty good job of giving a very
high level overview while still hitting some of the technical details.

that's just my opinion, and maybe it is easier for me to feel that way because
I'm already aware of (or have done) a lot of what the author is talking about,
so seeing the thought process is enough for me to grok the rest of the project
without more detail... if I knew less I might not feel that way. But then, at
that point, I probably wouldn't be in a position to carry out a project like
that, so detailed instructions wouldn't be super helpful anyhow.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't realize at first that the video was only
two minutes, and I have no experience with any of this, so as soon as the
wiring diagrams started firing off, I was immediately lost :P

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BeefySwain
This is great, love the pacing and the editing, the voice-over seems fluid and
coherent.

Perhaps I'm not the target audience, but you seem to make the assumption that
the viewer is familiar with the use case for this device. What I was able to
gather from the video is that this device allows you to generate triggering
audio/midi (?) in a more "organic" way than with something like a drum pad?

~~~
scarecrowbob
A lot of the cool parts of music making in modular systems comes from
injecting complexities that you can't quite fully reason through.

So in this case, the disk is a bit more complex than just using a clock and
some switches to send out a trigger signal, -- it's less reliable and less
precise.

But those are positive traits because it's easy enough to get a reliable,
precise sequencer.

For what it's worth, all this device is sending out is a trigger pulse, which
can be hooked to anything that would find a pulse like that useful... that's
what is cool about modular synths.

So you could use it to "trigger audio" by hooking that trigger pulse to an
envelope generator, but you could just as easily hook it to the "reset" of
another sequencer and have it start a sequence over with every pulse. Or you
could hook it to a flip-flopping swithc and have it, say, turn on and off the
reverb in time with whatever is on the disc...

it's a really fun (albeit expensive) way to make music.

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interesthrow2
Any tutorial about creating a simple software one out there? at least the
concepts. Been using flowstone lately, I wonder how hard it is to achieve.

~~~
wdfx
Not a tutorial, but I've been building one. One version of the software is
here:
[https://bitbucket.org/doughammond/simpleseq](https://bitbucket.org/doughammond/simpleseq)

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deadsy
You sequence the motor, get a pick up from the light sensor and then turn it
into a note trigger. It'd be simpler to sequence an array rather than a motor
and generate a trigger based on array content.

But sure. Art. It's a piece of kinetic sculpture....

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4b11b4
True. But then you lose the ability to generate a new sequence by cutting out
a piece of paper...!

~~~
michael_forrest
Yeah the whole point is to make it loose and organic instead of rigid and
quantized :)

