With regard to the starting point of my project, which is to enable improvisation of electronic music, I realized that I would benefit from using the concept of modularity, applied to the digital pattern sequencers. This happened by seeing how eurorack performances let musicians or sound artists to improvise. I wanted to harness this same power in the world of digital pattern.

This idea started in February. During November, December and January, I was struggling to fit all the functionalities that I wanted into the arduino pro-mini. I had seen that you can do 3d renders in TV screens, using this microcontroller, but there was nothing in my knowledge that I could do to shrink the consumption of processor time that my program was incurring in. https://github.com/autotel/thesis-prototype-zero/commit/a9413fb2c52825c5deaed022d47c6852d9ce6189 Perhaps I would need to know how to program in assembler. It was a better option to consider hardware changes. Check the commits during this period in my repository (here). 

I tried first bringing a second arduino to the mix, one that would handle all the pattern memory, while the other would act as a display driver. During March, I went to exchange in Kyushu, Japan. There, I started revisiting the conceptual roots of my project, exploring further the idea of modularity. If I was going to make a sequencer system that can be patched to other sequencers or operators, I would need to develop some sort of language that would make sure that I don't get stuck in the future because I defined a protocol that is too specific to the modules that I was designing now. You can read more first here: http://autotel.co/2017/04/13/modular-sequencing-digital-prototype/ and second here: http://autotel.co/2017/05/03/sequencer-environment-design-experimentation/

While I was exploring the possible concepts of a modular pattern sequencer, I also started researching about how to communicate several micro-controllers, in order to achieve this modularity. It is not a simple topic; and to the date I have not done a proven solution, although I managed to make a modular sequencer product, as I will explain later. See some posts where I asked about this http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=479753 and here: http://www.avrfreaks.net/forum/possible-heterogeneous-common-bus-input-common-bus-output-protocol. I got very insightful answers, and I am currently working in this problem. When I finish with it, I will come back later to those posts to explain my final solution.