ESP32 Control of Daisy Seed

Hardware Development
1

Hi there! I’m starting a project that will eventually be a tabletop synth (with Daisy at the core) that is WiFi/BLE enabled through an ESP32. I’d like to allow the ESP32 to send control data to Daisy and modify the parameters of a sketch so that the synth can be controlled through a Node.js server.

I wanted to get some advice from the group on the best route to go for controlling Daisy sketch parameters with an external microcontroller: would it be better to have the ESP32 send data to the Daisy over serial, or should I add additional circuits that allow the ESP32 to generate voltage changes and gates, emulating physical pots and buttons, and have those reads by the Daisy’s GPIO pins? For what it’s worth, I do also plan on having pots and buttons for tactile control of a Daisy sketch, but with the ESP32 there would be the ability for incoming control data to take over from the physical controls.

Thanks in advance for any advice on which method would be best to pursue!

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@TGargasz was doing something very similar recently.

He used SPI, but I’d say UART could be sufficient for such communication. The second approach that you describe doesn’t look like a sane way to do it (and I’m being gentle here).

1 Like
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Hi There! Following up on this: @TGargasz, were you able to use SPI to communicate between an ESP32 and a Daisy? Did you encounter any issues? I’m also looking into using i2c and UART as @antisvin suggested but I know SPI has an advantage with its transmission speeds.

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@walkindude125 , I used SPI. Check out Amplifier Project link.

Best tip I can give you; Keep all of your audio wiring as far as possible from the 8266.

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Thank you for the tip @TGargasz! I’ve looked into your guitar effects repo, but I can’t find an example of code where you are sending data from the Daisy to the ESP. Would you mind sharing an example of your code for the data transfer process?