[LAU] Open Source MIDI control surface

[Folderol]

On Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:00:01 +1030
Matthew Smith <matt at smiffytech.com> wrote:

> Quoth Ken Restivo at 2008-11-28 08:32...
> > It's so simple to make one with an Arduino, and a lot of code for surfaces that others have made is open source.
> 
> That could certainly be done - if you only wanted an 8-knob surface, the 
> ADC is already on-chip.  I briefly toyed with the idea of using an 
> AT90S8535 (or the ATMEGA version), using the onboard ADC, but decided 
> that I wanted more knobs, so went for the external ADC.
> 
> But yes, for the Arduino, just add pots and MIDI interface.
> 
> Not sure what the performance of a device like this would be though, 
> when you have an extra level of language involved.  Personally, I like 
> to stick to C when dealing with microcontrollers (and for the real 
> masochists, there's always assembly ;-))
> 
> Cheers
> 
> M

The code you use to program the arduino is a subset of C. As for speed,
in an industrial application I have one reading 2 external interrupts
which it uses as timing signals to pack the state of another digital
input into bytes, and then spit them out via serial @ 115200 baud. I
can get to about 80% theoretical maximum speed before it starts losing
data.

Provided you keep your code clean and efficient, I don't think you'd
have any significant latency problems running MIDI :)

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk