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Floorboard help...


NeveSSL
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I don't have a layout yet, but I thought I would share my concept and see how hard it would be to do.  This, for me, is the ultimate floorboard.  I currently have a DMC Ground Control, which is great except for it only has 4 PC buttons accessable while the top 6 are CC's.  It also has alpha/numeric naming and two expression pedals.  I want alpha/numeric and at LEAST one expression pedal, 2 if possible, but more important are the "buttons" or "stomp-switches" or whatever you want to call them.  :)  I'm thinking maybe I could make it a bit long and have 8 PC switches on bottom along with bank + and - , and then have 10 CC's up top. 

Ultimately, I need more than the 4 PC and 6 CC switches, the alpha/numeric, and one expression pedal (just 1/4" jacks... not built in), if possible, 2. 

How hard would this be to do?  I'm assuming the programming and the alpha/numeric would pose the greatest challenges.  Any thoughts?  This is exactly what I need in a pedal board, and only the $800 and up crowd offer it, so I definitely up to building one.  :)  Thanks!

Brandon

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I'm currently in the process of putting together something not totally dissimilar, though I'm intending to use mine for keyboards -  the point is that its still controlling parches, and cc's for live performance on a song by song basis.

Hardware wise you need 1  CORE, 1 DIN and  1 AIN modules. You could almost certainly get away without the AIN, and perhaps even the DIN if you limit the switches, but as the AIN is about 7 euros I figured it's not skimping and between them these will allow you more buttons and pedals than you'll ever need for this.

Software wise, I'm envisaging a song up/song down switch so that I can program in a set list, and when a song is selected a set of patch changes gets sent out reprogramming every device. It'll also respond to midi-in patch changes so that I can select songs from a keyboard. The other way to select songs (which I think would be quite neat) would be to have a song-select pedal, and when that is pressed playing a note on the keyboard selects a song rather than making a noise.

I'm not envisaging any explicit program select buttons, as my set up is too complex to mess around selecting individual patches live, rather you select a song, and then have CC's to modify that, but it would be a trivial change.

For each song there'll be a mapping from switches and pedals to CC's on various channels, so for each song the pedals get reprogrammed to do the right thing.

As I'm using keys I also want to do mapping of notes to channels for each song, but that's not much use for  guitar.

My current status on the project is that the core hardware is under contruction - I bribed a friend to do it, as they'll do a farbetter juob of the build than I would. I've set up the dev system, and build a few test apps, and once the hardware comes back it should only take a few days to get a prodotype running (I hope).

Ian

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Sounds great!  Keep me updated on the progress.  I have a question, though... will have you have a MIDI in so that the CCs are represented on the floorboard?  For example, if you have, say pedal 3 control the delay on/off, if you load a patch that has the delay on, will the led turn on?  Sorry, this is a bit hard to describe, but if you follow me, it's definitely something I want.  I know the DMC Ground Control Pro does it.  Good luck and, again, keep me updated!  :)

Brandon

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I hadn't thought about LED's for the CC switches - in my version they'll be external pedals so I can put the box on(or in) a rack/keyboard and have pedals on the floor switching them, so led's would be unnecessary, but it would be pretty trivial to add an LED out which just reflects the state of all the switches. To do that you'd need a DOUT module (which I don't have), but the software would function the same with or without one.

Ian

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