ok what’s up
been working on personalizing my mpc1000. this machine is like a fat man in a skinny man’s body - the skinny man’s skin hurts really bad w/ all the bottled up jellyrolls. essentially, the thing was built not to last, but one bit at a time, i’m fixing these problems.
my question is twofold.
first, the title question.
i’d like to replace one of the slide pots on the left
with one of these:
http://www.hobbyengineering.com/H1060.html
this is an infared distance sensor. essentially it’s like the dbeam on an sp808.
both sensors, the pot and the infared, are resistive, that is they output different voltages given their own respective environments - slider placement or hand placement.
i’d like to be able to control, record, and modulate qlink data using a sharp distance sensor rather than qlink 1, which is the top slide pot. this would still let me control stuff w/ a pot (qlink 2) but also have the more dramatic looking and natural feeling sweep of the hand.
the infared reads from 4 to 11.5 cm. that’s a convenient, comfortable distance. i will hopefully put it into a place where it could be triggered by my head - as i play my machine, i could lean in and modulate a filter sweep with it.
so a couple questions. first, since both are resistive sensors, is it reasonable to think i could simply swap em out? this is a really preliminary question since i know i havent given you the specs on the qlink - i’m working on getting that from a source in japan - but what do i need to know in order to match up the sensors so i can swap em?
has anyone had any experience with these infareds before? i played with the one on the sp808 and while some people found that it was clumsy, i was able to get reproduceable and enjoyable effects by using it. it was one thing to do it in realtime, but to be able to record one’s smooth hand movement makes my mouth water.
2nd question - much more simple. all of the buttons you see on the left and right are simple switches. they all make a clicking sound when pressed upon. this is not the problem - the issue is repeatability. after 2 years, a couple of these buttons are going bad. akai repairs sell these buttons for like 8 bucks a pop. i think i could do better. what are some switches that could work and are known to last a long time? 2nd, are there switches that one doesn’t need to necessarily PUSH in order to triggeR? i could live with a push switch ala the ones that are already on there, but only if they had a long lifespan. ideally, however, i’d like to be able to simply brush my hand against the mpc button and with a light touch trigger the button.
however, lifespan of the button beats the light press thing. anyone got good buttons to suggest?
thanks for your help and support.
peace
nym
