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MPC Pads and Sensors!!!!!!!!


Rowan
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I'm unsure how easy it would be to make the sensor sheet, remember that MPC pads are velocity sensitive. The contact arrangment suggest to me that the sensors work something like pizeo sensors. If it was a straight switching mechanism i would have thought each pad would need three contacts to transmit velocity?

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I did some work on a broken MPC2000 I owned for about a month (store sold it to me saying it worked, it actually had pins on the RAM SIMM shorted together, which I fixed.. and then noticed there was a crack down the daughterboard I had to point-to-point solder across). I wish I still had my notes, because I had sketched out most of the circuitry connected to the button sensors. 

IIRC the supporting circuitry was based around two amplification chips that each had two amplification channels, and would switch on columns (so one amp chip took care of the top two rows, the other chip the bottom two.)  I can try to get part numbers but the computer I was doing this research on is no longer working.

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Hm... looks nice, but indeed... 90 bucks phew... I mean that's nearly 1/3 the price of a fully assembled microKONTROL and there you have the same but illuminated (16 velocity sensitive pads) plus case, encoders, sliders, joystick and keyboard.

and: you need 16 AINs. Another question is if the resistance is in a useful range for MBHP to be directly connected to the AINputs.

I know this is a bit offtopic, but I have the impression that the button pads at sparkfun are now cheapter than before?

4x4 Rubber Button Pad 10,- $

4x4 Button PCB 15,- $

Not velocity sensitive but illuminateable :)

And maybe one could mount additional FSRs below the pcb... just a thought...

Cheers,

Michael

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I know this is a bit offtopic, but I have the impression that the button pads at sparkfun are now cheapter than before?

...quote from the site:

I KNEW they'd do that! A few stories on Make and CDM later, costs are covered, price comes down....

Edit: Quantity on hand: 6. Damn. Get in there guys!

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  • 1 month later...

hi

i had a look into my microkontrol and i can tell you the way it is about those velocity sensitive buttons, i bet it works the same way on the MPC.

Above the 16 button pads (or better on the other side of the PCB) there are 4 piezo elements, glued on the PCB, 1 each 4 buttons.So the buttons are both normal switches AND piezo, therefore they can easily avoid cross triggering and they can be used in both ways: you strike a button, the software knows that that button is related to that piezo and it will combine a MIDI event with the proper velocity.

It doesn t look so difficult to create such a system, we only need some code to combine the value coming from the piezo together with pushed button, maybe it is time to cooperate with Admir at edrum.info ? I imagine that with those spark fun buttons we could recreate something similar to Microkontrol or MPC.

Or better, we can do it better!! Homemade silicone/plastic buttons velocity sensitive, wow!

I think i will post also in the edrum forum and see what they say over there.

cheers

simone

hey it s my birthday!!

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  • 5 weeks later...

14 $ ????  ??? ??? ??? that s 20 times the value maybe more...

so i realized that the eDrum.info project is not open source so no way, but somebody said he d be able to program this stuff, do you think we can use the eDrum hardware for this purpose?

simone

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  • 2 weeks later...

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