Micro controller for BPM counter

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adsmith47
 
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Micro controller for BPM counter

Post by adsmith47 »

Hey guys,

This is my first post here and I am a total newby when it comes to controllers. I have a delay pedal that allows me to tap in the tempo of the repeats via a momentary footswitch. While this pedal has an LED that flashes to the tempo, it does not have a screen that displays the tempo. I would like add a screen to this pedal and through my research I have found that I need a micro controller, but i cannot find which one I need. Any tips, advice, or controller recommendations?

Thanks!

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Micro controller for BPM counter

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

How big and fancy do you want the display to be?

Starting from the simplest and moving up, we have 7-segment LED displays, LCD displays, and TFT displays.

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adsmith47
 
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Re: Micro controller for BPM counter

Post by adsmith47 »

Not fancy at all. i have looked at your displays (killer colors) and i only need a 4 digit alpha numeric display at the most. I want to use this one https://www.adafruit.com/products/2157.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Micro controller for BPM counter

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Okay, that makes things a lot simpler.

The easiest microcontroller board for a beginner is the Arduino Uno:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/50 - just the Arduino
https://www.adafruit.com/products/193 - Arduino plus a few extras
https://www.adafruit.com/products/68 - Arduino and lots of extras

and while you may not want to put the whole Arduino in a project, it's a good place to test a circuit and get things working.

Once you have the code and display working the way you want, you can move to a 5v Pro Trinket:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2000

which uses the same microcontroller as an Arduino Uno, but is designed to be built into a project.

There are some small differences between the Uno and the Pro Trinket (the Pro Trinket doesn't have a couple of output pins that the Uno does, and you need a special cable to make Serial.print() debugging work), but they're easy to work around.

We also have a series of tutorials to help you get used to the Arduino here:

https://learn.adafruit.com/category/learn-arduino

They start simple and work up through a range of jobs that tend to show up in most projects.

Once you're comfortable with that, we have a tutorial showing how to connect the quad alphanumeric display to an Arduino:

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-led ... phanumeric

You can use that to get started, then tweak the code to make it do what you want.

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adsmith47
 
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Re: Micro controller for BPM counter

Post by adsmith47 »

awesome! thanks!

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