Edt-2000: Expressive midi controller

While playing with the MaxMSP patch with the gloves on it became clear that having nothing in your hands feels a bit weird... Ideally you would just hold something like a nunchuck so that it feels a bit more natural.

Off course, in my collection of electronic stuff that I never use was a nunchuck controller and a WiiChuck adapter! Bought ages ago, never used; but finally it can have some use!

Coming Saturday we are going to try to patch together the first working prototype, but that's for the next update :)

Wow, I haven't used MaxMSP in a while. That program is complex! It took me some time to get familiar with the interface again..

But.... we can read the XYZ from both joysticks and display this (with some delay) in MaxMSP! Step 1 is set! I've uploaded the patches to git as well for version control!

Change your serial port in the patch if you want to use this patch!

Next update we will try some basic controls with Midi, but I don't have a midi interface at the moment!

Please keep me informed if you try to build this as well, I'm very curious to see if others are interested as well :)

Yesterday we had an interesting conversation about the direction of the project; writing code for the Arduino that sends out midi as an experiment is a lot of work and hard to debug and test. A plan came to mind:

The Ed-2000 is now a modified GameTrak controller that only sends out 6 values (XYZ values for both joysticks) in a Serial.println() -> to the computer. On the computer we can use a program like MaxMSP to play and experiment with the different 'modes' of the controller -> we simply don't yet know what kind of parameters we want to control with this thing!

The coming weeks we are going to experiment on the PC to find out what kind of controller we want to make. MaxMSP can send midi which we send to a Korg Electribe MX, so we can play around with different settings and parameters.

After we determine what it is we want to be able to control, I'm gonna dive into the Arduino IDE and try to recreate the functionality we made with MaxMSP (or any other pc based software) so that the Ed-3000 can be a standalone MIDI controller without the need for a computer!

To finalize this log entry some nice photos of the controller in it's current state (tie-wrapping the internals and screwing it all back together):

The controller came with a nice long USB cable, so I destroyed an old USB cable I had laying around and connected them to each other. This enables us to use the original cable that connects nicely to the casing with a pull-safe mechanism (so you don't damage the cable).

As always, make sure you use heat shrink to prevent shorts. A 'third-hand' is also one of those things that are well worth their small investment (around 5 euro's) when you do soldering.

You see the original cable and the pull-safe mechanism. It's all a tight fit but that's why we used an Arduino Pro Mini in the first place :)

All put back in place; like nothing happened.

Next update will be the results of a few hours of tinkering in MaxMSP or PureData (not sure yet which one to pick as I have some experience with MaxMSP 5). Thinking of PureData as it's open source and easier for anyone interested to download an play with. Thoughts?

To proof that this is indeed a good idea as a midi controller, the first step was to break one open and attach an Arduino to it's inner sensors. Unfortunately I did not took pictures of that process (next time I will), but I was smart enough to make some during soldering.

As you can see I soldered the two wires that are attached to the sensors to a piece of breadboard and an old Arduino Pro Mini I had laying around.

After testing that I could indeed read out the sensors I bought a midi plug and soldered these to the Arduino as well, to be able to test with some control messages for now. This needs to be a simple proof of concept!

That's it for now, I'm off to go program a simple program to send some midi signals! Checkout the git if you are interested! Expect updates somewhere next week when we finished testing.