Let's start! Step by step
In front of you are four sketches that will introduce you to the coding world!
Connect Synthia with your PC, open CircuitBlocks, and follow these steps.
Usually, there are displays on our devices, but we decided to change it a bit and put an LED matrix on Synthia.
First things first!
Let us introduce to you a few important terms:
- Track -> those are the LEDs in the middle of Synthia (the one with the largest number of LEDs)
- Cursor -> the white row under the track
- Sliders -> next to the sliders
Click on the new sketch in CircuitBlocks and choose Synthia since that is the device we'll be coding today.
You can name your first sketch "Buttons" because that's what we'll be focusing on right now.
Your Synthia has five pushbuttons, which we'll use to turn on the LEDs on the track matrix.
We'll need the I/O block labeled "When button pressed" for this.
The whole code that determines what happens when that specific button is pressed will be included within the I/O block.
For example, we don't want any of the LEDs to light up when we hit pushbutton number 1 (or slot 1).
Find this "Matrix" block and drag it inside the I/O block:
We must leave the intensity number at 0 if we do not want any of the LEDs to light up.
While we are drawing something on the matrix, we must add the "push frame to matrix" block at the end to ensure that this code is visible on the matrix.
You may perform the same thing for any other matrix by clicking on the "Track" button and selecting another matrix from the drop-down menu.
We want to code similar thing for each of the five pushbuttons.
This I/O block can be duplicated four more times to do this.
But, hey, the blocks are all the same now.
Don't worry. We'll change them right away.
As you can see, we coded every pushbutton and experimented with different intensities.
Another thing to remember is that if you create something with inputs (pushbuttons, sliders, encoders, etc.), you must include the "loop forever" block and place the "scan buttons" block inside it.
This ensures that your code is constantly scanned and executed correctly.
Click on the Run button, press the pushbuttons, and check the code.
Your Synthia has five pushbuttons, which we'll use to turn on the LEDs on the track matrix.
We'll need the I/O block labeled "When button pressed" for this.
The whole code that determines what happens when that specific button is pressed will be included within the I/O block.
For example, we don't want any of the LEDs to light up when we hit pushbutton number 1 (or slot 1).
Find this "Matrix" block and drag it inside the I/O block:
We must leave the intensity number at 0 if we do not want any of the LEDs to light up.
While we are drawing something on the matrix, we must add the "push frame to matrix" block at the end to ensure that this code is visible on the matrix.
You may perform the same thing for any other matrix by clicking on the "Track" button and selecting another matrix from the drop-down menu.
We want to code similar thing for each of the five pushbuttons.
This I/O block can be duplicated four more times to do this.
But, hey, the blocks are all the same now.
Don't worry. We'll change them right away.
As you can see, we coded every pushbutton and experimented with different intensities.
Another thing to remember is that if you create something with inputs (pushbuttons, sliders, encoders, etc.), you must include the "loop forever" block and place the "scan buttons" block inside it.
This ensures that your code is constantly scanned and executed correctly.
Click on the Run button, press the pushbuttons, and check the code.