MIDIator

A simple Python application to receive data over a UDP socket and translate it into MIDI control changes. The GUI is written in PyQt5.

Usage:

Running main.py directly using Python 3

To run the main script directly:

1. Clone or download this git repository to your local machine and cd into the main folder
2. Create and activate a virtual environment with Python 3.8.2 (earlier Python3 releases might also be ok)
3. Install dependencies into the virtual environment using pip install -r requirements.txt
4. cd into the main folder (the folder with all .py files) before running any scripts/functions.

Running the prebuild version

Soon, executables will be available for download directly from here for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms. These require no installation whatsoever.

Micropython

For Micropython some scripts are given to get started on the UDP connection and a sample code reads raw data from the MPU-6050 to send accelerometer and gyroscope data from the microcontroller to the UDP socket.

Add custom midi-device:

The program is written in such a way that it should be easy to customize the interface (i.e. add more controls or other midi events). Currently the devices (iphone orientation and micropython) are represented by a QRunnable class in "udp_accelgyro.py". Other classes can be added here and then also in the main.py they should be added to the combobox in line 38:

self.comboBox.addItems(["Micropython Accelerometer", "Sensor_Data iOS app Accelerometer"])

and then on line 200 is where based on the combobox selection a function (line 226, 231) is run to start an instance of any of the available classes in "udp_accelgyro.py":

if self.comboBox.currentIndex() == 0:
            # QApplication.processEvents()
            self.udp_micro_accel()
            time.sleep(0.02)
            self.guibuttonupdatestart()

...

def udp_micro_accel(self):
        self.worker = UdpAg(self.port, self.udpip, self.sock, self.outport)
        self.threadpool.start(self.worker)
        self.worker.signal.new_signal.connect(self.close_sock)

It is importent to work with QRunnable classes and start the "workers" using QThreadpool(). Since receiving on the UDP socket is done using socket.recvfrom() and this is a blocking call. Running it in the same thread as the main application would freeze the GUI and the app would go unresponsive.

Current implementation includes:

• using the orientation sensor of your phone (using sensor data streamer on iOS)
• using a microcontroller running micropython and the given source code (also using orientation to control MIDI sliders)

Acknowledgements

The dark breeze theme is directly copied from Alexhuszagh his BreezeStyleSheets which is based on QDarkStylesheet

For micropython and the MPU6050 inertial sensor the I2C library by adamjezek98 was used and is included