What is the rule for trig or gate voltage

What is the rule about the voltage level at which the modules must activate when they receive a gate or a trig? The doc says : “Therefore, trigger inputs in Rack should be triggered by a Schmitt trigger with a low threshold of about 0.1 V and a high threshold of around 1 to 2 V” Does this mean that the triggering will be between 0.1 and 2 volts depending on the module? I ask because there are some modules that wait up to 5 volts. Is it expected behavior ?

What this means is, for a module with a 1 volt high threshold on a gate input, a voltage voltage presented to the input that rises to 1.1 volts say, will register as a high gate when it reaches 1.0 volts and will stay registered as a high gate until it goes below the 0.1 volt low threshold.

How the modules behave depends on the what the developer intended.

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I usually use 2 volts going up and one going down. The vcv spec used to be 0, which I pointed out made no sense. .1 is ok, but I’m sticking with 1, 2.

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Ha ok. Got It.

Thank you both.

But, is a module who need 5 volt to react is considered a “correct” behavior ?

It depends on what the developer intended. For example my modules generally use 1 and 0.1 although there is one that is modelled loosely on a hardware module that uses different values. The Lunetta Modula modules have the option of using different values.

As long as the deviation from the VCV standard is documented I guess there is no incorrect behaviour.

5 sounds like a wierd choice, but probably ok. I always put out 0 and 10, so 5 would work just fine. Maybe there are some nut-jobs who only put out 5?

As some of you may remember, when I first started porting Meander for Windows to VCV Rack, I struggled with how to handle my use of volume over MIDI in a CV world. What I initially did was to send “volume over gate” info, where the gate signal peak level is the volume for the note CV. This works great, but runs afoul of the VCV gate standard to some extent. As I implemented it, I allowed the gate on voltage to range from 2.1V-10V. Which should properly gate any module that follows the VCV spec, but the gate could also be split and sent to a VCA to modulate the note volume or amplitude. This is pretty neat, even though this volume cannot go to 0 when the gate is on, but can go to 0 when the gate is off. In most cases this is fine as there is not much need to gate a <2.1 volume note.

But, there was a good bit of concern by other developers that I was sort of breaking the standard, but not really if all modules interpret the gate signal according to the VCV standard. But, never-the-less, I left this behavior in Meander for V1 and never had any reports of problems, but I made it a menu option in V2 with the VCV standard being the default.

I have no idea whether anyone has ever played around with this, or is even aware of it, even though it is documented in the manual.

In my opinion, innovation always requires a balance between following the rules, breaking the rules or perhaps changing the rules. But, I probably fall into the category of “nut-jobs” :wink:

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In hardware, Pamela’s New Workout needs not more than 5V

Thank you all for explanations.

I was asking because I tried to use Alikins’ “momentary of buttons” to trig Nysthi’s “SlimDualFixedVoltageSource”. As Momentary only sends 5v and SlimDual needs 10v, it doesn’t work. This is not a problem because I usedVCV Pulse instead of momentary, but I just like to use compact modules. By the way in its manual Momentary says it sends 10v but it only sends 5v. a bug ?

Who is to say if it’s a bug. It seems like an odd choice…

Maybe not a bug, but at least a typo error, as the manual say it deliver 10v, and checking the source it’s clearly 5v.

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