VGA Experiments 2

It’s been a while since I updated these VGA experiments. I’ve mainly been working on audio synths recently, but a recent conversation on VJ Forums sparked off a flurry of activity.

Littlescale, aka Sebastian, got in contact after reading the last experiments page. He created some nice visuals using an arduino board to to relay midi messages from Ableton Live, through the digital outputs via a MAX/MSP patch he wrote.

It inspired me to blow the dust off of mine and try a few things out. Firstly i took the RGB led dimmer program from the tutorials and made a few changes, but ultimately it took an audio input, split it into bass mid and treble via an additional circuit and pumped it into 3 of the analogue inputs of the arduino. From there it converted these voltages into PWM signals which normally drove an RGB led, but i patched them straight into the RGB lines of my VGA break out box instead.

The result was entertaining. It produced scrolling lines of color that pulsed on and off, no fading, in line with the peak of the frequency in the color it represented. The more grain per frequency, the more intense the colors became, filling more of the screen, but all mixing with each other to create vivid bands of color in sync with the music, much the same as Littlescales, but much more basic (think Spectrum ZX cassette loading graphics…) and rough looking. On the “Aesthetically Pleasing Scale of 1 to 10″, it scored a paltry 4.

“Where’s the video’s you say?” Aye, good one…. You should know by now that I’m crap at this documenting thing.

I’ve also been using some very buggy code that i wrote for Arduino to produce the Vsync and Hsync signals needed to produce a stable VGA signal. But it wasn’t stable, and it went out of sync very quickly, and i’ve since realised that the Arduino might not be able to produce the clock signals needed due to it’s timing commands. Please feel free to prove me wrong though. ;o)

However… Over the past few nights i did bread board a few things to see what i came up with, and the results were very interesting!

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