I had spent about 1 month of free time and it’s very interest to make that kind of device day by day. Idea about handmade variants is from that site, from midiboxes.
One of the LEDs is 3-pin (2 color LED). One part of it is knobs-only midi-activity LED (LED4), second color is for switch (LED3 = S1). Other is: S2 - LED5, S3 - LED6, S4 - LED1, S5 - LED2
Sliding potentiometers are nice. Now i’m try to build something like Midibox 808 (drum midi seqeuncer). I think first of all i try to build this site variant because of firmware. So now i have din/dout modules = it’s really nice hardware and in any way i will use them. Now the question is: to use midibox core or self made core module. It’s really hard or expensive to find PIC18f4620 in Russia and also i would like to work with Atmel controllers.
I think the point is that a MIDIbox is not just the MBHP_XXXX modules, in fact they are a fairly small part of it. The software that has been developed and refined by TK over the last 12 years, namely MIOS and the MB_SEQ (which the MB-808 is based on) is the biggest part.
These are 100% developed in PIC assembly so it would not be that easy to port to another platform, TK first started the STM32 port over 18 months ago and although he has made massive progress, much of it is still “beta”.
The MB-SEQ/MB-808 are complex programs with thousands of lines of code and I really can’t see why you would want to re-invent the wheel recreating it on something like the AVR which doesn’t really offer much in functionality or performance over the PIC device.
Will a newer controller be next? (For example instead of a potentiometer rotary ecoder.)
Maybe. I try to sell my device in Russia now. If i’ll have success with that i will develop newer version of device. Yes, i want to try 1-2 encoders - it is interesting for me like radio-hobby
I really can’t see why you would want to re-invent the wheel recreating it on something like the AVR which doesn’t really offer much in functionality or performance over the PIC device.
If you are musician and you need to receive completed device it’s best idea to copy or buy midiboxes or something like MIDI DJ CJ CONTROLLER
But if you want to have some fun time with interesting radio-hobby, maybe better to make modifications or 100% self made devices. But i don’t see problems to use experience of peoples who already have skills and completed projects, like TK.
Now i have 10 knobs, 4 buttons & Jogwheel@encoder, LCD 16x2 symbols.
It connects via USB and work like midi-device in Cubase, FL Studio, Virtual DJ, Ableton, …
There are schematic, sources, PCB, .hex-flash in the article. Use google translator to read article and translate from russian to your language.
I see the newest version uses the midibox 64e firmware! I think this is a good choice so you can spend your time developing hardware instead of software!
