WARNING: shameless plug post. Please ignore if you don't like.

Since its not in any way game related, I don't think this is worthy of a "Your Announcement" thread. I just wanted to share this project I've been spending a lot of time on (though my gamedevving has suffered because of it ), perhaps some of you will find it interesting?

For the past three months (including down time when we accidentally fried the main board and had to wait 4 weeks for a replacement) myself and my brother, who's a DJ, built our own custom MIDI controller. Well, semi-custom: its a hacked and modded Midifighter (schematics and firmware of the Midifighter are open source). I did all the firmware programming, my brother assembled all the components, did the case and is working on Traktor MIDI mappings for this thing.

This morning, after a 12-hour all night hackfest, we finally completed it! I will be releasing the code within the next two or three days and we will eventually get around to blog about how we did it. In the meantime, here is a few preview photos and a very brief video showing the controllers "demo mode" (basically just cycling LEDs). The original announcement that we were working on this project can be found here on the DJ Tech Tools forums.

Besides a lot of solder, the project consists of the AT90USB162-based Midifighter, which was programmed in C, and a PIC24HJ32GP302, which I programmed in PIC24 assembly. This is being used as a simple LED driver, communicating with the AT90 over SPI.

If anyone is interested, feel free to fire me any questions and I will try to answer them, if I can. Please let me know what you think, I'd love any feedback I can get (good and bad ). What details would you most be interested in when I get around to write a blog post or two?




Brief youtube preview video here. Some pics below and a few more pics in the DJTT forum thread above.

Very impressive! Recently I've been working extensively with midi programming myself, nothing as cool as building my own hardware of course, do you have like a journal of the whole process? I'd be interested in reading it if you do/did

Nice work. I have a friend that just turned an NES running pad into a MIDI controller. He's been using it as an input device into Max/MSP. Really cool stuff.

Thanks guys!

Very impressive! Recently I've been working extensively with midi programming myself, nothing as cool as building my own hardware of course, do you have like a journal of the whole process? I'd be interested in reading it if you do/did

Yes, this is coming, but will take us a little while to prepare. We definitely do want to upload a build log type thing explaining in a reasonable amount of detail what we did, what worked, what didn't work and how you could go about building your own. We will also be uploading a few more pics and a video or two showing it actually being used - but the Traktor mappings will need to be finished first (and theres a few hundred MIDI notes to be mapped). But, yes, this is high on the priority list.

Nice work. I have a friend that just turned an NES running pad into a MIDI controller. He's been using it as an input device into Max/MSP. Really cool stuff.

Cool! I've heard of people doing stuff like this (repurposing game controllers and other electronic devices). Interesting stuff .

Aaaaand its open source!!

Source code available on Github here.