DIY Meter Bridge?

[Mrosso]

Has anyone ever tried to create an LED meter bridge for a Mackie Control Universal midi control surface. I know that DAW programs will send level info to a control surface (Sonar does it with the Tascam US-2400 at least). This would be an interesting project. Anyone else?

 

[SSLtech]

Serial data, probably buried deep inside a manufacturer-specific stream.

Very difficult. -VERY.

Keith

 

[ruairioflaherty]

The Mackie Control has level meters - granted they are some of the slowest, lamest meters ever to grace an audio product. I think this is caused by a combination of a slow midi connection and the sh*tty display on the MCU. I'm not sure I understand the need for meters in this application, how far is your MCU going to be from your screen? - 6 inches? Isn't the relative info displayed right there in your DAW.

Meters on an analogue console serve a different purpose as they are there to help you optimize headroom in a real analogue path - remote LCD meters on a digtal control surface (especially one as limited as a MCU) seem pretty pointless to me. BTW I work daily on a HD3/2xlcd/Mackie control rig so I'm keenly aware of it's strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps I'm totally missing the point though,

cheers,
Ruairi

 

[Mrosso]

Thanks to all... Your responses make a lot of sense. Did sound kinda like a fun project. To be honest, I was more interested in seeing the little LEDs light up and dance than in any real useful application.
thanks again,
Mar

 

[ruairioflaherty]

That's cool - hope I didn't come off as discouraging. The last thing we need is more projects :grin: What I need is time and money to build all the projects I've got lined up,

stay well,
Ruairi

 

[the scum]

Funny synchronicity...A coworker and I were discussing exactly this (well, for Cubase instead is Sonar) earlier today.

Yes, it's possible to build. If you're into microprocessor based stuff, it's not a terribly demanding design. Watch an input serial stream for some values, and use them to update a set of LED displays. Any modest microcontroller (PIC, AVR, etc) could do it pertty easily. With some matrix scanning cleverness, you don't need an IO pin for every LED, and will never actually turn them all on at once, so you won't consume tons of power doing it.

The hard part comes to interfacing it with the software. Cubase supports a user-definable controller definition, that makes this a feisable task. Does Sonar have an equivalent?

You'll have to reverse engineer the control protocol, or define your own. You could sniff the MIDI link to the Mackie using something like MIDI-Ox, to see if you can figure out how the meters are updated. Cubase also lets you define your own control surface definitions...you could use CC or NRPN messages for the data.

You might also poke around the MIDI-box pages at ucapps.de. They may have something more or less ready to go.

Byron Jacquot

 

[SSLtech]

[quote author="the scum"] it's not a terribly demanding design. [/quote]
Hahaha! -What you see versus what I see:
[quote author="SSLtech"]Serial data, probably buried deep inside a manufacturer-specific stream. Very difficult. -VERY.[/quote]
See... you described how it's done and I STILL haven't the faintest hope of doing it!

Seriously, I'd love to be able to do that sort of thing, but -like most people on this board- I just don't have the ability or tools to do it.

-Now I can design and build you -from individual components- a mic pre, an EQ, a compressor, a gate, a mixer, a B-format surround decoder, an amplifier and -if I was really pressed hard- a set of speakers, all of which (except the speakers!) would sound great! -but ask me to build a PIC circuit to flash an LED on and off, and I can't do it!

Keith

 

[the scum]

I'm very deeply a microcontroller guy...I could have a wirewrapped proof-of-concept for this together in a day or two.

So a total change of design concept:
Is there a way to get some extra analog outputs from the computer, and run them to a box full of LM3915s?

Byron Jacquot

 

[yan_b]

at least in cubase it's possible to route midi signals through the midi controller mapping page , including meter data to cc data.

thats mean taht you have to build midi interface that accepts cc data and convert the value to led bar display.

as always http://www.ucapps.de/ rocks on diy midi info.