Norns

The norns is a raspberry pi-based sound computer from monome. I currently have the norns shield as part of my music setup.

Developing norns supercollider engines locally

Sometimes I want to work on a norns supercollider engine locally. This gist helped and also this community wiki post.

1. Pull the norns repository
2. Make symbolic links from norns sc folders -> SuperCollider Extensions folder:
   • ln -s ~/Developer/monome/norns/sc/core ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-norns-core
   • ln -s ~/Developer/monome/norns/sc/engines ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-norns-engines
   • ln -s ~/Developer/monome/norns/sc/ugens ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-norns-ugens

3. Make symlinks to Norns community repos e.g. ln -s ~/Developer/monome/we/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-we

4. Make symlinks for custom engine development e.g. ln -s ~/Developer/MyNornsMachines/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/MyNornsMachines

I can send commands to the engine using something like

n = NetAddr.localAddr;
n.sendMsg('/engine/load/name', 'Thunk');
n.sendMsg('/command/load_sample', 1, 'sample.wav');
n.sendMsg('/command/note_on', 1, 1, 1.0, 1.0);

Using Digitakt as a soundcard

You can use the connecto script to connect Audio over USB to the Digitakt. This works great, but seems to use a little more CPU. So to make the change more “permanent” (you can always undo these changes and reboot of course) I found this suggestion on lines:

Change line in /etc/systemd/system/norns-jack.service from

ExecStart=/usr/bin/jackd -R -P 95 -d alsa -d hw:sndrpimonome -r 48000 -n 3 -p 128 -S -s

to

ExecStart=/usr/bin/jackd -R -P 95 -d alsa -d hw:1 -r 48000 -n 3 -p 128 -S -s

and then reboot (or sudo systemctl restart norns.target). The digitakt needs to be connected and powered on when the norns boots for this to work.

My norns projects

• thunk