Rpi3 hydrogen

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MattKingUSA
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Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

Rpi3 as a hydrogen beat machine. Works great. I had a dedicated laptop for this but the pi has replaced it. This is a touchscreen setup. Using portaudio and alsa midi. It runs on battery. 8x 18650 > 5v 2.1a
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-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

Turns out works great with lmms and midi keyboard using alsa.

-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by kbongosmusic »

That's neat. Thanks for sharing. I like the idea of a synth/music linux appliance.
I'd like to get something like that setup using either a laptop, tablet or maybe a pi3 is a good solution.
Was it much work to setup? Did you have to compile stuff?
Are you using whatever it has for stock audio hardware in/out? Have you tried the audio in?
Any good links to pi3 audio adventures?
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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

kbongosmusic wrote:That's neat. Thanks for sharing. I like the idea of a synth/music linux appliance.
I'd like to get something like that setup using either a laptop, tablet or maybe a pi3 is a good solution.
Was it much work to setup? Did you have to compile stuff?
Are you using whatever it has for stock audio hardware in/out? Have you tried the audio in?
Any good links to pi3 audio adventures?
I just did sudo apt-get install hydrogen and the same for lmms. Then i plugged the usb drum pad and keyboard in and it worked.

But the touchscreen i had to install xinput-calibrator and then run xinput_calibrator then created an xorg.conf.d directory in /etc/X11 i believe and then copy the output there after calibration into a file but i cant recall the name of the file. Sorry on the road right now or i would put more details here.

-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

Oh as far as audio input you will need a usb audio card. And ive not tried it on rpi3 rpi2 was really bad for audio though.

-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

Hydrogen works great on the pi3. But lmms crashes too much. :(

-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by English Guy »

How much did the hardware cost please
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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

I spent 80usd on samson midi keyboard 40usd on drum pad. I purchased screen, touch panel and usb touch controller from "buy display" for around 50usd. I purchased the battery usb pack case for 8usd on ebay and had 8x 18650 batteries on hand already. The pi3 was 29usd at microcenter. The steel plates were 3usd at lowes. They are 8 inches by 4 inches. And the brass spacers were purchased on ebay for 7usd. The stylus was a 2 pack from Walmart for 4usd.

Edit: I also purchased titanium drill bits at lowes to drill mounting holes in steel plates and make pi mounting holes larger using drill bit by hand on the pi pcb.

2nd edit: I am currently using pi to record drum loops without issue. Recording to ardour 4 on main computer. Using pi3 audio jack as output. All together I've spent no more than 250usd on this computer. Also the micro SD is a class 4 8gb. Not sure where I got that old drive.

-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by Chrisblob »

MattKingUSA wrote:Hydrogen works great on the pi3. But lmms crashes too much. :(
Sorry for slow reply, I've only just bought an RPi3 specifically to set it up as a soundfont player using USB MIDI keyboards and LMMS.

Regarding LMMS and the RPI2/3 check which version of LMMS is provided by your distro - if it is v1.0.3 then yes, you will experience very frequent crashes - thankfully I can confirm that in v1.1.3 those crashes are almost completely gone. If you have Raspbian Jessie you are likely to have only v1.0.3 by default - I ditched Raspbian Jessie and installed a custom FedBerry LXQt image on my RPi3, and by default it had LMMS v1.1.3. Raspbian is a great distro, but the maintainers sometimes only provide very old versions of software for stability - that is fine if stability is your thing, but ironically that means *some* software will contain bugs that were fixed in later revisions - LMMS just happens to be in that camp.

If you can update LMMS to v1.1.3 from source, or do like I did and install a pre-built v1.1.3 by switching to a different distro (I recommend FedBerry LXQt, runs very well) then those LMMS crashes will be a thing of the past.

I have 2 USB MIDI keyboards (M-Audio KeyStation 88es, and Novation LaunchKey 49) plugged into my RPi3, and a Behringer UCA202 USB Audio interface handles audio (inbuilt Pi audio has only a tiny buffer and is only 12-bit). I have 2 instances of the SF2 player running, with some quite big SF2's loaded - works pretty flawlessly, and I add some effects attached to knobs on my LaunchKey to emulate tremolo/vibrato/rotary speaker etc. RAM is the only bottleneck depending on how big the SF2's are.

Cheers,
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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by MattKingUSA »

Wonderful news thanks!

-Matt :D

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Re: Rpi3 hydrogen

Post by decomp »

Hi, I know this is a very old post but I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on using hydrogen with a touchscreen? Is it an enjoyable experience?

I am considering getting a 2 in laptop like a thinkpad yoga to use for sequencing drums. I don't enjoy programming drums with mouse and keyboard. I have been using a hardware sequencer to program drums (the Korg SQ64) but it is a bit limiting.

Thanks!

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