cp_midi_control_surface_001

I should say at the outset, my knowledge of electronics is minimal: I know Ohm’s law (but I’ve not had to use it since school), certain components have to be connected the correct way round, a smattering of ‘this component does this thing’. I can read a schematic, my soldering is tidy and I can follow instructions. That’s it. So if you’re expecting something clever you’re not going to find it here (at least for the time being).

Right, with that out of the way, here we go.

So, in the preramble I mentioned OpenDeck, it’s an open-source platform for building class-compliant USB MIDI devices. I’ve had my eye on the project off and on for a while, but the main board was a little too pricey for something I didn’t know if I could do at all with very little experience of electronics, so I sort of looked at it, sighed and went back to looking at other control options. I’d failed to see that it would run on an Arduino. Silly.

It wasn’t until I saw this post on CDM that I realised that, at least as a ‘dip your toes in the water’ option, I could get the code running on an Arduino, and I had one gathering dust somewhere in the lock up where all my things are currently languishing as I’m between homes. Result. Much box opening later I was ready.

Digging a little deeper I found out that to completely start from scratch you needed two Arduinos to get up and running. Arse. While they’re not that expensive and the instructions were pretty clear there was a lot of scary, I might not be able to do this, stuff involved. But it was almost Christmas, I like to support open-souce projects wherever I can, and the developer was selling preconfigured Arduinos for not very much through Tindie, so I bought myself a present. I was doing this.

A few days later my board arrived. Connected it up to my laptop, opened the web interface and hey, I’ve got a thing! A thing with no inputs, but, hey, a thing! This is going to be great! Now for the difficult bits…

What to build?

As I want to work with audio, specifically VCV Rack, I thought a good starter project would be to clone the two Core VCV Rack modules MIDI-CC and MIDI-Trig, both have 16 inputs: the CC module for potentiometers and the Trig module for buttons. Nice and simple, and useful too.