Hi all,
This is my first post on this forum, but I have been studying all the aspects of Thorsten’s excellent Mbox work for weeks now. You may skip to the bottom if you don’t want to read my long-winded intro. :)
I’m rebuilding a custom controller called the “Axe Thing” that I built in the late 80’s (see
http://www.spacecase0.com/phil/axething.jpg for a picture (but beware, it’s about 700K!) 
The old Axe Thing used a 6502 computer and a hand-wired MIDI interface to scan the 32 touch switches along the neck and send them out as (fixed-velocity) MIDI note messages. Its trackball (and the three keyboard-style switches on the “horn” plugged directly into the Commodore Amiga’s gameport; the MIDI notes and trackball info fed into and controlled custom music software I developed on the Amiga.
I have (reluctantly) moved on from the Amiga over the last few years; however, I have also found great joy in using Reason in live performance, so I have hit on the idea of redesigning the Axe Thing to use as a Reason controller. I’ll be scanning the trackball’s encoders directly (in addition to the neck touch switches), adding a joystick, a few knobs and extra switches, led’s, and, I hope, a piezo percussion sensor - as in the eDrum.
The MBHP will be my inspiration for the hardware, though I will probably wire a custom version of it to fit in the small space I have available. MIOS looks like the way to go with the firmware - what an excellent design! I’m a newbie to PIC programming (though studying hard and learning fast), but it looks like Thorsten has done all the hard work and organized things in a very easy-to-use format.
My question (FINALLY!): it looks like I’ll need to build the programmer in order to get the bootstrap code into the PIC18F - is that correct? After that’s done, I can just reprogram using MIDI?
Thank you for your excellent work, and your generous help, Thorsten.
Phil Stone