CNC Music Factory - MIDI to gcode Portal

I'm making a note here - *huge success*

First output from 'mid2cnc.py', a program to convert MIDI to gcode linear moves, allowing one to play music on a CNC machine (will publish it when it's done!). … more info

I'm making a note here - *huge success*

First output from 'mid2cnc.py', a program to convert MIDI to gcode linear moves, allowing one to play music on a CNC machine (will publish it when it's done!). The music is Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" from the ending credits of Portal.

Basically, it's possible to compute a combination of (distance, feedrate) that will cause the stepper motor to spin at an exact frequency corresponding to a musical note. With a little vector magic, the same can be done for (x, y, z, feedrate) to produce chords as the machine follows a 3D line through space.

TODO:
Handle more than 3 notes played at a time (drop some if there are not as many axes...)

Lock notes to their initial axis for their duration (maybe only an issue on my ghetto machine where the axis motors sound very different)

(try to) Improve frequency accuracy where 2 or more notes are played simultaneously (may be a CNC software issue)

A description of how it works is on my blog at http://tim.cexx.org/?p=633   less info

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• Added 7 months ago