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I am trying to build a mapping device on NG basis to connect a Mackie C4 Pro to basically every imaginable kind of hardware to make it universally usable. My starting point was reading the MIDI messages coming from the C4, which worked fine. The other way round, though, is giving me a hard time, because the C4 just stays in its startup screen and doesn't react to messages which would work when going through the Mackie Commander software (I already successfully tried that, I can get the displays going and everything) So it seems that when going the way over my MIDIbox something is missing. Like an Ack message to let the C4 know, that it's supposed to listen now. Has anyone ever had a problem similar to this with any kind of hardware controller? I also tried to mirror the power on message sent out by the Mackie and sending it back to it. Didn't work.

So I am planning to build a microcontroller as an interface between a Mackie C4 Pro and, theoretically, any kind of Hardware/Software component. The component that is to be controlled will be determined, and the configurations specified, by templates which will be stored on an SD card. To realize this I will be using the STM32F4 module with the SD card interface and a MIDI 2x2 module. Eventually another 2x2 is planned to additionally connect a MIDI keyboard. I am a newbie to the MIDIbox forum so I started researching and decided to take the NG project as a starting point. To me this means that in order to implement this I need to alter the .ngc .ngl and .ngr files to a) have a communication with the Mackie that will, basically, always stay the same and b) generically prepare the other side of the microcontroller so that the user can specify the mappings to his hardware/software himself. RPN, NRPN and SysEx must be possible. This of course means that the chosen parameters and their state will be required to be displayed on the Mackie's displays, which, after reading the NG and STM32F4 specifications, I think is possible. A final requirement is that the configurations will have to be stored into a textfile (I was thinking XML) so that the user won't need to actually open the .ngc files and do his settings there, but rather that on startup the device considers the textfile as belonging to a certain configuration file, checks if something was altered in the textfile, if so applies it to the configuration data and then sets that up as the current configuration state. What do you guys think? Does that sound possible? Did I choose the right components? And has anyone ever done something similar and encountered problems that maybe I could encounter too?