bjosephs
Well-known member
AKA the silliest project I've ever undertaken.
Still not complete, though nearing an end, I started this project in 2016 according to my files. I was enamored with control surfaces in the early 2000s when my recording/production journey started but the high cost and often excessive size prevented me for just buying one. Sometime around 2013 as part of my engineering degree I started to dabble in Arduino programming and after graduation, at some point early in 2016 I stumbled on this thread post that linked to someones painstaking reverse engineering of the protocol. I spent a week's worth of sleepless night drafting my first attempt at a one way implementation to collect status from a session on my computer. It worked well enough.
Over the next few years I picked the project up for maybe 100 hours at a time experimenting with various considerations like PID control of the faders, motor driver circuits that don't whine, what kind of encoders I would use, what type of displays. Oh, and how to process all the user inputs, displays, and USB data reliably - something that ended up with my current implementation which uses 8 atmega chips on an I2C bus managing "modules" and communicating with a 9th microcontroller that handles USB and the scribble displays. I spiraled in that state for a long time but some unexpected time off early this year prompted me to lock in some choices and try to finally bring this to a close. In the time since I began I had purchased many parts. The faders I'm using are now NRND and the encoder cables are obsolete. I bought NOS LED displays because the ones I had my eye on 5 years ago had quadrupled in price.
In comparison, the cost and capability of control surfaces has improved substantially. Surely when done I'll have spent 3 times as much and gotten maybe 80% of the functionality. But I have learned a staggering amount and enjoyed many fantastic "ah ha" moments.
In the next few posts I'll put some pictures of various parts/states of the project and, hopefully, before long I'll have the whole thing done. But I'll link one cool video here as a preview.
Still not complete, though nearing an end, I started this project in 2016 according to my files. I was enamored with control surfaces in the early 2000s when my recording/production journey started but the high cost and often excessive size prevented me for just buying one. Sometime around 2013 as part of my engineering degree I started to dabble in Arduino programming and after graduation, at some point early in 2016 I stumbled on this thread post that linked to someones painstaking reverse engineering of the protocol. I spent a week's worth of sleepless night drafting my first attempt at a one way implementation to collect status from a session on my computer. It worked well enough.
Over the next few years I picked the project up for maybe 100 hours at a time experimenting with various considerations like PID control of the faders, motor driver circuits that don't whine, what kind of encoders I would use, what type of displays. Oh, and how to process all the user inputs, displays, and USB data reliably - something that ended up with my current implementation which uses 8 atmega chips on an I2C bus managing "modules" and communicating with a 9th microcontroller that handles USB and the scribble displays. I spiraled in that state for a long time but some unexpected time off early this year prompted me to lock in some choices and try to finally bring this to a close. In the time since I began I had purchased many parts. The faders I'm using are now NRND and the encoder cables are obsolete. I bought NOS LED displays because the ones I had my eye on 5 years ago had quadrupled in price.
In comparison, the cost and capability of control surfaces has improved substantially. Surely when done I'll have spent 3 times as much and gotten maybe 80% of the functionality. But I have learned a staggering amount and enjoyed many fantastic "ah ha" moments.
In the next few posts I'll put some pictures of various parts/states of the project and, hopefully, before long I'll have the whole thing done. But I'll link one cool video here as a preview.
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