[sdiy] damnable digital interface.

[Batz Goodfortune]

Y-ellow Steve, Tim and everyone. (except Jim who trashes my posts. :P~~~)
         Dare I say it but probably the best way round the rotary encoder 
problem would be a small micro to interpret it. Some would say this goes 
without saying but I say nay and say there's more to it than they. (I've 
really got to stop reading Dr. Suese.)

Apart from the lead/lag encoding these things spit out, you'll probably 
find that there's a timing issue with the Polly it self. Put simply, the 
polly is a bit light-on for CPU power and probably couldn't read the 
switches as fast as the encoder can spit them out. I suspect the effect 
would be rather like a non-de-bounced switch. Somewhat hit or miss. Or 
under/over shoot in this case.

I don't know how the debouncing is done in the Polly but knowing korg it'd 
be half assed to make up for the lack of processing power. At the very 
least you're going to miss pulses. At worst it could be the synth 
equivalent of a DoS attack. (Denial of Service) Where the synth locks up 
under the weight of it's own interrupts.

You could decode the rotary encoder with a little bit of logic but with a 
micro as middle man, you gain some control and extra functionality that 
would otherwise not be practical. Depending on the number of pulses you 
spit from the encoder per rev, you could decided to either accumulate those 
pulses and spit them out in an orderly fashion. OR. You could decided that 
you are going to skip pulses that fall outside the timing range. Or even 
some combination of both. Not only that but you could select which series 
of buttons the encoder will control. Not just the up/down buttons etc. Even 
getting way too smart for your own good and getting it to control complex 
sequences of key presses.

Now one more little idea I'd had in the back of my mind along these lines 
for some time. (Hey it almost rhymes) IS, in a word. "Mouse Balls"

There's a nice little optical encoder inside a mouse and the mouse it self 
does all the interpreting for you. So I've been toying with the idea of a 
bit of code in a micro somewhere that can read mouse droppings and 
determine their origins. It might be tricky but you could, if you wished 
mount the mouse wheels as knobs on the front panel, or even better... Get 
one of those touch pad things and mount that to the front panel. Would that 
be cool or what?

A Polly 800 with a touch pad. Oooooo. Make a neck for the thing and play it 
like a guitar even.

I'm pretty sure there's mouse reading code out there for most small 
embeddeds if you needed to use it.

Hope this helps.

Be absolutely Icebox.

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