pachde One, featuring Imagine

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

I’m pleased to announce that pachde One is released and available in the VCV Rack Library. pachde One free and open source.

All the modules in pachde One offer Light, Dark, and High Contrast themes, and removable screws. Most include some handy presets for various patch scenarios.

I’ve dropped a couple of simple Demo Patches on patchstorage to get you started. These use only free Core and Fundamental modules, so anyone can try them out. Feel free to share your patches there and tag them with pachde-one. Patches with that tag should show up when you click the link above.

There are 4 modules in pachde One: Imagine, Null, Info, and Copper.

Imagine

The flagship module for pachde One, and the reason this plugin was created.

It’s an eccentric source of voltage, gates, and triggers from an image. Supports a number of basic graphic image formats. Here it is in Light, Dark, and High Contrast themes with sample images from the factory presets and the center instance in X/Y Pad mode.

Imagine has a read head that scans your chosen image, generating voltages, gates and triggers. It’s sort of a sampler for images but generates control voltage. Includes a number of stock images in the factory presets to get you started. Imagine doesn’t generate audio: it’s not an oscillator; it’s akin to a sequencer.

Choose from a variety of traversals (Scanline, Bounce, Vinyl, Wander, and X/Y Pad), click to move the read head. Shift+Click the reset button to save a new default position for the read head. Scrub using the mouse, or drive the read head using control voltage. Start and stop the traversal or reset the head position using CV. Choose from a variety of color components sampled at the read head to drive CV output or use the raw x/y and RGB outputs. Make sure to check out the options available in the right click menu.

There are many possibilities for creating noise and chaos with this one, especially when photographs are the source image. To tame it, keep the speed slow, turn up the slew, and/or turn up the g/t (gate and trigger) threshold. For more “musical” results, run the outputs through a quantizer.

Carefully prepared images can be used for more predictable results. With photos, try selective blurring to smooth the signals, posterize to quantize, pixellate to make the outputs chunkier. The possibilities with prepared images are endless.

I am really excited and looking forward to seeing your videos using Imagine!

The other modules in pachde One are:

Null

A discrete, minimal, resizable, blank blanking plate, with some fancy features for a blank plate. See the Null documentation for details.

The next update to this module will include an option to make it even blanker, including presets suitable for blue/green-screen effects.

Info

A lean and clean basic resizable patch notes module, with a couple of fancy tricks to light up your patch. Info documentation

Copper

A modulate-able color picker. Be sure to check out the menu options to pick colors from the palette that includes a gray ramp, some custom colors (like the VCV Core and Fundamental panel color) and SVG standard named colors. Extends Null and Info for choosing and animating their colors. Handy for panel developers, too.

_______________

I hang out here and the VCV Discord and happy to answer questions. if you find a bug, please open an issue on github. The plugin doesn’t have a donation link until the next update, but you can visit the repo and scan the QR code or click the link to buy me a coffee (or a Mac to test on :-])

Thanks!
#d (pachde)

[1beat_Zip1measure (Alpha little Async)]

Not really understood but i imagine that this is a form desiger for RACK?

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

Not at all. None of the modules in pachde One are a form designer, although I found use for Copper while designing the panels.

Imagine is a control voltage source, much like a sequencer. The source of information to generate voltages, gates and triggers is the pixel values read from an image by a moving read head. It’s more structured than S&H of pink noise, but much less structured than notes from a step sequencer.

Null is a resizable blanking plate, with customizable colors, animatable via it’s extender Copper, and the ‘hidden’ plug on the logo.

Info is a patch notes module and can be animated via Copper as an extender.

Copper is a color picker. It can source hex color values that can be used with many other modules that provide for customizable colors. It extends Null and Info and can be modulated with CV to generate visual effects on a patch.

Download the demo patches to get a better idea.

[1beat_Zip1measure (Alpha little Async)]

“Copper” is a reference to Amiga?

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

I had an Amiga for a while, but I don’t remember anything related.

It’s “Copper” because if you mumble “Color Picker” just right it can be heard as “Copper”. Plus, my wife loves using copper as an important substance or color element in her art works.

[1beat_Zip1measure (Alpha little Async)]

I remember,reading old amiga magazine,that the creators of the Doom like “BreathLess”,used an undocumented function of the ‘copper’ chip

There is an utility on amiga which make a color gradient on the desktop with nearly zero power consumption

ARRRRgh…I’m old

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

If you’re interested in the early design and development of Imagine (and the other modules in the plugin), visit this thread.

[purf (Urs Basteck)]

Looking forward to trying out Imagine very soon but… and this is likely apparent to anyone who’s seen more than two examples of my VCVing: a down to 1HP resizable blanking plate with custom colours? Oh yes!

[DaveVenom (Dave Benham)]

Yes - that sonically superfluous yet versatile blank is much appreciated.

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

One of the demo patches uses Null with custom color through its extender Copper, animated by the CV signals from Imagine. It’s set to glow in the dark, so try turning the room brightness down for the full effect.

I thought a few folks would appreciate some party lights in their patches

[dag2099]

@pachde

I thought a few folks would appreciate some party lights in their patches

It’s really useful for Livestreamers to have that sort of thing. Personally I’m always looking for more stuff. At first I thought Alikins Color Panel was strictly better, but then I read a bit more of your post and saw the bit about Copper being and extender for Null. It’s an interesting approach. edit to add: Imagine does work with RGB Matrix, though it is very low rez.

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

I’d be interested to see the patch for that!

I think there’s more that can be done in this space. One of the challenges is cross-plugin inter-module communication of data other than audio/cv. The data interchange over cables that we scaffolded out in this thread Interest in a module+protocol for sending text over VCV cable? - Development - VCV Community (vcvrack.com) is promising. What we built works for any data, not just text, due to the mime type header in the protocol. I think part of what’s needed is two-way handshaking, or some way to set refresh at a given rate. For color animation, we only need a maximum of the screen refresh rate.

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

pachde One 2.1

VCV Library - pachde One (vcvrack.com)

I’m pleased to announce that pachde One has been updated for Rack 2.4, with some new features, including options to follow Rack’s “Use dark panels” setting (or not, or to go Light when Rack is set for Dark if that’s what you want :-). Because it uses the new setting, pachde One 2.1 requires Rack 2.4. It should be available for Apple Silicon. Open a bug if it isn’t.

Here’s the Imagine demo patch in a darkened room, slightly tweaked with 6 instances of Null module being used in “green-screen” configuration to overlay the Rack background with a cool blue. Copper is there used to manipulate the color and transparency of the overlay. If you look carefully, you can see that Imagine has the screws, medallion and labels turned off.

Change highlights:

Version 2.1

• Add Follow Rack - Use dark panels option to all modules. This is enabled by default, using the Dark theme. You may want to consider switching to the High Contrast theme for an even darker look.

• Imagine

  • Add CV input for Speed.
  • Two new traversals: Talabar and Ralabat.
  • Fix the Mica factory preset to show the correct image.

• Null

  • Add Show branding option so you can turn off the remaining adornment. Useful for blanking and green-screen applications.
  • New factory presets for green-screen, blue-screen, and magenta-screen.
  • Option to ignore Copper
  • Support Initialize and Randomize

• Info

  • Option to ignore Copper
  • Support Initialize and Randomize

• Copper

  • Support Randomize

See: Full change log

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

First video I’ve seen using Imagine (posted on the Rack Discord):

TCVPTTKSHSU — Yesterday at 7:59 PM

Imagine Example

very nice.

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

Version 2.2.0 of pachde One just dropped to the Rack library.

Imagine adds the minT knob and CV control for the minimum time before retriggering or making a gate transition. This can tame the chaos a little bit and get a more regular rhythm. It’s minty fresh!

Imagine also comes with two new factory-preset images:

New Module: Copper mini. This is a mini version of Copper for use as a less intrusive expander module. It has the same underlying module and expander functions as Copper, but without the picker graphic, and only 2 units wide.

Copper can be daisy-chained (hsl outputs to hsl inputs) to animate multiple Info or Null modules with identical colors (or maybe connect only some of the components). When a Copper is connected to another Copper or Copper mini, the CV is absolute rather than relative to the knob.

Here are three copies showing the Light, Dark, and High Contrast themes,

[dayvyg]

I’d really like to use Info for patch notes etc. but it’s a bit frustrating adding text to it. The Edit Info window is small and you can’t easily add a blank line between lines of text. It doesn’t appear to be scrollable either. Am I missing something?

Thanks. d.

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

This is the default Rack text editing experience which leaves a lot to be desired, especially for multiline. Doiing better in Rack is a lot of work.

I just use whatever editor is convenient on the system (the BASICally module has a little better text editor)) and paste to Info, using either the keyboard or right click menu.

I looked into it, but decided not to invest in text editing – everyone has a notepad on their computer that will be better than anything you can do in a Rack module.

[StochasticTelegraph (Mahlen Morris)]

There is a “just text” sister module to BASICally called Fermata (for writing longer notes ).

[Yeager (Peter Vos)]

@StochasticTelegraph

Fermata

Works great

[dayvyg]

Okay, will give it a go.

Thanks, everyone!