Digital-Piano-LED VS pijFORTHos

Not as my main computer, but as my digital piano sidekick, a USB output from the piano goes to my Raspberry Pi which runs Pianoteq (makes the piano sound like a $100k piano). Optionally, the Pi lights up some addressable LEDs coinciding with keys.

https://github.com/youfou/pianoteq-pi & https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED

A nice "gateway drug" is an addressable (programmable) LED strip. Hook it up to a Raspberry Pi or Arduino and have at it! I bought cheap motion sensors and will be installing a strip along the inside of a staircase to light up when I approach it.

https://github.com/whyboris/Arduino-LED (see "stairs.ino")

Another project of mine is having the LEDs light up as I play piano:

https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED

Unsure where I'll go after I finish these projects, but LEDs are so much fun!

A fun tech-related project is hooking up an addressable LED strip to a digital piano and making the strip respond to your key presses on a Raspberry Pi.

My repository for this (code finished, just need to add photos and add a write up about how to use):

https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED

I added a feature that the left and middle pedal buttons navigate through sheet music (PDF left/right button). And I'm also running Pianoteq which makes any (even dinky) digital piano sound like a $100k grand piano (or any piano you pick for that matter) https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq

And having run across jonesForth (https://github.com/organix/pijFORTHos/tree/master/annexia read the .s file and then the .f file) and basically the idea of building your own personal software stack from scratch, but part of the problem is just having hardware that wasn’t designed to be super complicated to interface with (like USB being much more complicated than PS/2 or wiring up your own grid of switches for a keyboard).

I want to write one for bare metal (non-Linux) raspberry pi (ARMv6 32 bit on Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero; ARMv7 and ARMv8 on higher models and also supports 64 bit). I want to have no dependencies required though so was thinking of bootstrapping it with nothing but machine code (determined initially with the help of an assembler and documentation of course). Someone has already ported jonesforth the Raspberry Pi[1] but using serial i/o as the user interface and it has dependecies to build it, but I should be able to get ideas from how they coded their assembly parts compared to the original jonesforth. I want to be able to use HDMI for the screen (already tried it out with some bare metal tutorials in assembly so that's do-able) and again, with no dependencies. And I want to show people how to do it themselves, not just have it be something to run that they don't understand fully. It should also be possible to have the forth kernel build/assemble itself if needed, or cross-target another platform.

I know I'm all talk right now, like you say, I need to manage my free time so that I would have the "copious free time" to work on this.

[1] https://github.com/organix/pijFORTHos