stryd_one

If you didn't know about compiling the app.... Time to read ucapps.de some more!!! Much more! :)

You don't want a momentary for a power switch, or it will only be on while you hold it in, so your midibox would turn off unless you kept one finger on it all the time.

OK done some homework on this now... Firstly, I can now see that the connector is a 3-way jack, one of those connections will be for power, and the other two for the signal and ground, so it shouldn't be so hard to power up the device and get a multimeter onto those pins and get measuring. The power pins will be obvious, so you can begin to test the remaining pin against the ground pin. The multimeter will almost surely hold your answer... But what to test for? According to this PDF, "A capacitor plate moving in relation to a fixed plate thus change the overall capacitance as used on Akai EVI/EWI 1000 wind synthesizer and the Yamaha BC1 breath controller." So maybe capacitance? Perhaps this capacitance is internally converted to a voltage, or some other measurable change to the current. I wonder if you've asked the guys at MIDI Solutions (from your link) about this? I doubt that they would be willing to share the information, but you can always ask... And then if they won't tell you, then they're obviously too busy making money to be helpful, so you can 'rub it in' later on when you release a DIY version of their product ;) If you are better with hardware than I, you might be able to make some sense of this schematic which takes a BC3 input: http://www.tfe.umu.se/personliga/jh/simple.htm - the readme also mentions this email address for help: johan.haake@tfe.umu.se I found a lot of useless information at http://www.patchmanmusic.com/ and http://windsynth.org/, you might be able to email them for more info... I've also joined the Yahoo Group at http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/windcontroller/ and once my membership is approved, I will ask in the mailing list. I'm sure someone there will be able to help out, but of course there are lots of people making money from these kind of devices, so they will probably try to do their best to stop us from gaining this info. Cross your fingers! Seeing as you haven't had any luck with Yamaha yet, it might pay to contact them again, perhaps by a different method this time. Telephone almost always gets a preferable response, as customer service departments find it easier to be flippant in emails. Let me know how you go.... I'll keep you posted on the Yahoo Group.

The "push-to-make" switches are also known as momentary switches, or more correctly in our case, SPST Momentary, which stands for Single Pole Single Throw. Momentary switches are those which switch on when you push them, but switch back off again when you release them - they're only 'ON' for the "moment" where you are pushing them in. Hope that helps. It's actually something which doesn't appear to be mentioned, I should add to the wiki. Thanks for pointing it out, and for the links too :) Oh and those anti-vandalism switches are pretty looking, but they're not designed to be easy to push (that ease of use is sacrificed in order to achieve a more solid device), and they're greatly overrated (120V,10A)... might not be the best thing for a MIDIBox...

Good on you mate! Thanks! :D

Not to mention that Microchip seem reluctant to fix certain silicone errors :\ I would love to see a more advanced chip in a core module to replace the PIC18F... But I think that trying to support two different chips is definitely a bad idea. Maybe one day in the distant future the PIC18F will be superseded, but I think that for now it is doing OK - and if they ever do fix those silicone bugs, it will be much better.

Glad I could help. This is a very frequent question around here, I should have written that long ago :) Pots and faders are pretty much the same thing so there is no problem sharing them on a single AIN, but as Moebius pointed out, you only need 8, so you don't even need the AIN :) You're right there's no need for such a fader on a MIDIBox. Crossfaders usually work like a pair of sliders built into one box with one knob to slide. Sliding to the left decreases resistance on the left channel and increases it on the right, and vice-versa when sliding to the right. Scratch faders are specially designed to have two specialities over other crossfaders: Firstly, they are designed to have less friction when moving the slider so that you require less finger/wrist strength to move the fader, allowing for faster and more accurate fades. Secondly, they are designed to introduce less noise, because the higher fade speeds mean that as the electrical contacts in the fader move around, there can be some small arcs as the current flow is adjusted. Just slide any normal fader fast enough (if you can) and you will hear the arcing as a crackle. Now, a DJ mixer's crossfader is not necessary because it is actually like two variable resistors in one. We don't need that, because one slider which can send one message, can then used to inversely control volume on two channels within your mixing software. Also, your MIOS application would probably need to be adjusted. I'm not sure of the rate which MIOS takes a sample of the slider's position (not off the top of my head anyway), but I would imagine that the speed at which you would need to send messages in order to fully take advantage of such a fader may require that MIOS be altered.... Not to mention the DJ software is unlikely to be configured for volume control at the speed of full-speed scratching. But honestly, there are only a few DJ's who have the skill to move a fader accurately at such speed anyway, so sampling at the normal rate would probably be fine unless you're the kind of DJ to win most of the battles in your area - and I mean underground hiphop scratch battles, not techno DJ competitions. I guess what I'm saying is, knowing nothing at all about your personal abilities and going strictly on statistics, that you're probably not as fast as the fader could go, so you probably wouldn't need it, and even if you do, Ableton probably couldn't keep up with you. I've lived with a few DJ's in my time and I can say for 100% sure that no current software could keep up with these guys - hell the soundcard latency is greater than the time taken to do some of their fades, so even the PC hardware couldn't keep up. (think about your standard crab, that's 8 movements (four fingers, each pushing the fader down and the thumb pushing back up each time) within a 1/8th note. At 100BPM that's 26ms each movement, and you'd want at least a few volume gradients within that, say 8 of them, so there's just over 3ms per movement) That said, a single pole fader could easily do the job, and there are certainly uses for a low-friction fader. You might want to look around for a low-friction, single channel fader, just so it feels a bit more like a scratch crossfader, without meaning that you have to spend too much money on overspec'd parts.

;D hahahahaa ::)

Sounds like a great project! I hope you'll share your story with us as you progress :)

Exactly :) Check out the example application on the ucapps.de download page, it's called sm_example (actually there are two). The SM stands for Scanning Matrix. Yours is a 2x3 design, the example is setup for 8x8, so it'll need some modification... FWIW I Hope to test the example out and extend it to larger matrices later on, as I will need it for the vX. Your matrix is 2 DOUTs X 3 DINs, total of 6. The example is 8x8 = 64, but you could run many, many more buttons. Using a whole DOUTx4 and DINx4 module would be 32x32=1024 buttons!! Even I don't need that many! :)

I hope you might find this addition I have just made to the Wiki helpful. You might have to re-count afterwards though ;) 1) See above, but you've kinda got the right idea. 2) See above and ucapps.de 2) Bag of components. It's a DIY project! 3) Yes. Thanks goodness for Mike and Smash, or people like us might not be able to find the time! 4) No, you are making a customized MIDIBox and you will need to make adjustments to the MB64e application, or some other app, to make it your own. 5) You will need to reconfigure the application, see above 6) You could install it from any OS which can send MIDI. The MIOS Studio Application runs in java, so yes you can do it from a Mac 7) What crossfader? Yes, probably! Now I've done my best to answer your questions I'm going to balance that out by telling you that almost all of that information is freely available and not at all hard to come by if you look for it. You mentioned that you read around but it was all too confusing. Often we find ourselves in that situation, but the answers are here, so if you didn't understand them, I'd recommend that you take on a simple project first to get more familiar with how these kind of things work. You could start with something standard and simple like a clockbox with just a core and LCD, and then experiment by adding DIN's and buttons and writing a little code to make the buttons perform a certain function like playing a note or sending program change messages or something, and grow the project from there...

I just gave up smokes to buy more boards. MIDIBox is good for your health ;)

I can see you thought this out :) That reminds me, I was going to add a camera to my tool collection... it's a very handy thing! I didn't notice that lit switch at first, that's great! Very clever indeed :D

Way to make code dude! Thanks for sharing!

:( I'll look around some sites I have bookmarked for you. Does it come by any other name, or with any other items as an accessory? What does it normally connect to?

Thanks for the ad pau. ;) I've seen those and I'm curious but that's a big project and I'm wrapped up right now. I do think they were mentioned a year or more ago, quite a long time back.... Almost surely on the old forum.

Nice work!! I think this would be good on the wiki, would you mind if it was there? Many unix users could benefit from your skills.

Hey bud, thanks for pointing it out! You're right, all DIY is good DIY! Pretty impressive effort to build from scratch, don't you think? And not even the bootloader...great stuff. The x0x is coming I promise! I will be very surprised if it is not a 100% working prototype within 6 months. I won't build a full control surface until the vX is more advanced but the code will be there for a minimal surface and it will be ready for a full one if anyone wants an x0x.

I thought you said you were new to this! :D

LOL thanks for catching that one man! Fixed now.

MIOS could do all that :) It's a shame he didn't base the whole thing on MIOS, would have been good ... I still bookmarked it ;D It's a great project!

Go man, go! :D

oh my gosh is Google.com down today or something? ;) A service manual is a document used by a service technician when they need to repair an item. They have things like schematics and pinouts and stuff. It's like a datasheet for a whole device. You will probably have to ask Yamaha for one. Edit: The reason I say ask Yamaha is that I googled for it and didn't find any available online :( You might have better luck than I!

No you didn't say that before, but you've made it clearer now. I would avoid hydraulics and stick with magnetics . Moebius has the right idea... Edit: Fixed from where I spaced out, see below :)

What's the deal, didn't this guy know about the MIDIBox or something?