So I've decided to try something using my LittleBits Arduino bit and my LittleBits Adapter Eurorack module: the Dumbest Possible Quantizer.
(To overexplain, a quantizer takes a continuously varying voltage as an input and outputs a voltage that follows it, but in defined steps. The usual use case in Eurorack is mapping a control voltage onto the levels needed to produce, in the volt per octave tuning, a musical scale; you run random voltage levels through and get more musical results.)
Quantizer modules typically support different scales, modes, and keys, and sometimes even temperaments, but for the Dumbest Possible Quantizer, I'm limiting things to the bare 12-tone chromatic scale. And as suits the title, I'm doing this in the simplest possible way: I'm taking the 10-bit ADC value of the input — a number between 0 and 1023, covering from 0 to 5 volts — and mapping that onto the 60 midi notes that cover those five octaves. I'm then immediately turning around and mapping those 60 notes onto the 8-bit (0-255) value that the PWM "analog" output can take. This is nobody's idea of the proper way to do this, but since I actually had decent success using the second half as a USB MIDI to CV converter on this board already, it has a reasonable chance of approaching the desired functionality.
Long term, of course, I intend to build or otherwise acquire a quantizer module with real functionality, probably using a proper DAC; I'm following the in-development Teensy 4.1-based Ornament and Crime upgrade with great interest. But I really want to see how much I can do with very low effort!
