[sdiy] PIC Quantizer project

[Grant Richter]

> I should play with this on my PSIM. Probably won't, though...

The first thing I wrote for the PSIM was a parallel 4 channel voltage
quantizer for the PSIM. Input to output latency is about 800 microseconds.
You can download the software free from the Yahoo newsgroup. You just edit
the notetable to output different scales. I think there is also a version
where different notetables are selected by a voltage (that is voltage
control of scale select).

The software also transmits the quantized voltage out as a MIDI noteon event
with each of the 4 input channels transmitted on a separate MIDI channel.

Using microcontroller Basic, the whole application took about 2 hours to
write and debug. Basic gets a bad rap because they don't teach it anymore in
the schools, but it is very fast to write and ideal for small projects like
a dedicated voltage quantizer embedded in a microcontroller (assuming you
already know the language).

Modern compiled Basic code runs as fast as compiled C code. The Basic Atom
Pro uses a form of "tokenized" Basic where the "tokens" are blocks of
machine language code. It executes very fast for a non-compiled language.