Jero

I'm gettin excited now haha, a 9V would be perfect cause I don't want to have an LCD connected when it's finished anyway, but as suggested I'll pick one up for debugging. I do like the idea of powering from USB but that would mean having two cables going from my box to my laptop which I'd like to avoid if possible by keeping a battery contained in the unit. Then again It would be nice however to have the option included though if the battery dies and I don't have a replacement. and as for the size of the CORE kit being 3.1 x 2.35, I think that maybe the smart thing for me to do right now is just sacrifice some of the size and make it slightly bigger for now while I get the hang of how to do all this stuff, a CORE kit like you said seems to be a safer route for a first timer. It would be nice if I could eliminate the DIN though, I want this thing to be as basic and simple as possible. And those little battery units are pretty neat, something to look into anyways. Thank again for all the help everyone!

Alright, so from what I understand so far, if I were to order a CORE kit, a DIN kit, some MIDI jacks and buttons, I should be good for most of the parts? Also, could I operate a device this size from a 9v Battery? And for buttons I was thinking of doing sumthing like ripping apart an old PC keyboard and using a strip of keys somehow as the buttons, haha I dunno just tossing ideas around. Thanks for the help!

Wow, great and thanks for the fast response! :)

Hello everyone, I'm completely new here, and new to the idea of building any type of MIDI devices. I do however have an electronics supplier where I can get parts at cost and I'm an trades electrician with limited electronics knowledge but enough to understand what most things do. I've been tossing around this idea in my head for a long time so I came searching the net for an answer and found this forum. What I want is very basic, all I want to build is basically a one octave MIDI controller keyboard on as small of a scale as possible. Just an on or off sort of thing, no velocity sensitivity or anything fancy, just a row of 12 buttons and that's all. I'd like to be able to hook it up to my laptop just to get the very basic functionality of a MIDI controller with Propellerheads Reason 4, and I'd like to then be able to attach it to my guitar for live performance, so I want it to be very small. I'm just wondering where the best place to start would be, and if anyone has an idea of approximately how small I could build such a device. I'm hoping in the order of not much more than 2"W x 8"L x 1.5"D.... Is this possible? Thanks a lot! --JERO