Resources for (nearly) absolute beginners?

Hi, I wanted to find out how to go from a Daisy Seed to having it on a breadboard and working with a couple of choice components so I can explore the basics. I’m picturing me twiddling a knob and making a pure data oscillator change pitch or something as a first step.

I’m so unsure about this that I wondered if it (the Daisy Seed) somehow had to be an Arduino “hat” (I don’t yet know what the correct term is in Arduino world). For all I know I may have been correct, but the get started stuff I’ve looked over seems to assume that you have your hardware sorted out to a certain degree. (It kind of starts in with “Great let’s start programming it” ) Perhaps I have been impatient or not found the correct materials. Or perhaps I’m overthinking it…

Is there something out there that says “Yay you got a Daisy Seed, here is what you do to start working with it -including how you set up basic hardware”? Do I just solder in header pins, plug it into a breadboard and start making mistakes? Do I have to join it up with an Arduino first? Where do I draw the circle and what spells should I chant?

I realize that I could slog through other breadboarding topics for other platforms etc and slowly slowly gain some competence in the assumed knowledge by going through a number of iterations on other platforms, but if there was something that just situated what to do with a daisy seed, I’d tip my hat to those that let me know about it.

I should mention I have not bought a Seed as yet, I am still investigating what it is and what I’d need to get to start making it work. I’m also looking at this as a possibility for a STEAM program for my work in a library. Thanks for your patience.

Daisy Seed is a standalone microcontroller + RAM+ Audio CODEC board.

You don’t need any Arduino boards to go with it, but it can be prgrammed using the Arduino Development Environment.

A Daisy Seed sure can live on a breadboard, but it needs quite a lot of external electronics to make it work - Input and output amplifiers including voltage converters. There’s no documentation except the schematics (with crypic annotations) on how to build it all - you’re on your own if you don’t buy the Daisy Pod as a minimum “host” for the seed. Questions about voltage conditioning for the seed inputs are often not answered on the forum.

“getting started” is here: Home · electro-smith/DaisyWiki Wiki · GitHub

Are you sure you really need the Daisy ? You’re talking puredata patches and knobs.

Maybe check out the Raspberry Pi Pico for starters, to generate MIDI messages from knobs, buttons and sliders, and let the computer generate the sounds.

In terms of getting started with hardware, Daisy platform is no different from other solutions (such as Arduino, Teensy, etc).

Seed’s pinout is your friend. Aside from that - it might be good idea to define what you actually want to do. And then start asking more specific questions.

FWIW, I’d recommend Pod, since it has some hardware controls provided, and you can easily hack on top of it.

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Thank you folks. It seems Daisy is not for me. I’ll have a look at the Pico idea above as a starting point, I think it may be more forgiving.

Hi Aesop,

Welcome to the forum!

As mentioned in this thread, the Daisy is a standalone development platform for audio and does not require an additional Arduino board to function.

Breadboarding

There are Fritzing breadboard diagrams and associated code examples in the DaisyExamples repo for the Seed.
Here is a link to the specific example on wiring up a potentiometer.

Programming

Is there a specific programming language you are planning on using?
That would dictate how to continue learning.
If you want to use C++, here is an example of a simple sine wave generator.

If your goal is to create audio hardware, the Raspberry Pico is not going to be an ideal choice IMHO since it does not feature any audio circuitry onboard, and most examples are not going to be audio specific.

Hope this helps!