LC Construction questions

[Lorcan]

Hi fellow MidiBoxers,

I'm at the (beta) planning stage of an 8-track Mackie MCU clone, with a few enhancements (master analog volume control, phones control, dim main out, and maybe dedicated eq soft dials). It might seem strange to want to build a Mackie Clone now, but I've seen it in a shop and thought I could do a more robust unit (the jog had popped out on the brand-new demo unit), with meters as and added bonus, customized for my use with Cubase, and expandable, thanks to Thorsten and the rest of this great community.

So I've read all the topics (yes !) in this subforum and most others too, but I would still need someone to make this clear too me:

- can I layout the buttons/led freely, ie departing from the switch->dIn and dOut->Led pin assignements indicated in the .pdf diagrams ? More precisely, looking at the setup*.asm file, I see I can enable/disable buttons and leds, but I'm not sure if i can swap the pins and then change the assignments in the setup file.

The reason I'd want to do this is to have more degrees of freedom in making custom pcbs for holding the switches, leds and ideally dOut and dIn modules altogether on one PCB, to minimize interconnects (more tidy, cheaper, even if that means more layout work for me).

- will the R4D core bring significant improvements for the LC application ? I have a PIC already, so I'm going to use MIOS8 at first anyway

Regards,

Lorcan

[philetaylor]

Hi.

Yes you can assign pretty much anything to anything :)

If you have looked 'closely' at setup_midibox_lc.asm, you will see in the comments at the top of the file:

go through the button/led assignment table in src/lc_io_table.inc

and map the Logic Control/emulation specific functions for your needs

There is a good description of the LC_IO_TABLE_LAYER? in this file, as you should see, all buttons/leds can be assigned to whatever you want!

;  In this table all functions are mapped to the DIN/DOUT pins

;  Every button/LED combination has it's own entry

;  First entry for first button and first LED

;  Second entry for second button and second LED

;

;  DIN and DOUT are working indepently, that means that you are allowed

;  to assign different functions to a button or LED of the same entry

;  number. In this way you can save some DOUT shift registers, since not

;  every function provides a response to the LED

;

;  Keep also in mind that the encoders and LED rings allocate some DIN

;  and DOUT pins, which have to be defined in main.asm and mios_tables.inc

;

; IMPORTANT: this table MUST consist of 128 entries!!!

; unused lines have to be filled with "db ID_IGNORE, ID_IGNORE"

EDIT:As the 32bit CORE has so much more memory and is so much faster than the 8bit one, it is bound to be a massive improvement but the beauty of the Midibox design is that as soon as you are ready to move to a CORE32, you simply unplug everything and (with minor adjustments) connect them to the CORE32.

Cheers

Phil

[Lorcan]

Errmm .. I guess I must have not looked closely enough  :P

In fact I had seen this but also read some statements elsewhere which seemed in contradiction with this, hence my doubt.

They were probably specific to other MIOS applications.

Thanks !

[philetaylor]

No problem ;)

I often find with midibox projects that there is so much information that it can be a bit daunting to sift through it all to find what's relevant to you....

Cheers

Phil

[cinhcet]

it's amazing that so many people want to build the LC...

Have you got a solution to have an analog masterfader? When you use motorfaders, you can't multiplex the analog inputs with a Ain module

[Lorcan]

I'm not interested in the masterfader, I plan to incorporate an analog control for my monitors.

IMHO there's no real point in having the 9th fader as master, except maybe for trimming your mix in one go.

The output from the DAW is best at close to 0dBfs, otherwise you'll be losing precious bits.

My soundcard (RME Fireface) has quite a complex routing matrix (Totalmix) with an integrated zero-latency mixer, but as many people do, I'd rather trim my ouput with a pot than wasting bits.

Mind you with 24bits it doesn't make that much of a difference if you lose one or two bits

Still purists go as far as doing all the summing with a dedicated analog box (summing mixer, which costs big $$$  ???)