Custom Controllers

[midifidler]

@obsidiance
lol sweet then you'll now just what a amazing party scene we have here...:eek:

[midian]

@obsidiance
lol sweet then you'll now just what a amazing party scene we have here...:eek:

Break it down to some FiddyCent and Lil'John at teh outback! Fuuuck yeah.

[tekki]

Jus' lean back... lean back... lean back...

[ToS]

midifidler, you can crank some piezo under that button array of yours and add velocity sensitivity. Some manufacturers use 4 piezos for a 4x4 button arrays, clearly one piezo measures 4 buttons simultainiously. Not precise enough but works.

[midian]

^ Thats a pretty sweet idea.

For DJing tho, how often would be pressure sensitivity reaaally be that useful.?

[midifidler]

Here is a pic of the new slim enclosure, sans joysticks, for the midifighter. It is now the same height as the vci. The top plate is now laser-cut clear acrylic painted on the inside so that the paint doesn't scratch off with time.

[ToS]

Slick surface....nice color contrast.
The price of mine was ~200eur. Casing is from a Commodore128D, hand drilled and milled.

[midifidler]

@Tos,
Chur bro
You should post some pics up, its not that red one I've seen around?

[DanF]

While M-Audio has the velocity sensitive Trigger finger for $250 USD, you could be sitting pretty if you could market these for less than $200.

So now, you have a pro product that appeals to both the beginner crowd AND the Expert crowd.

Here's an idea; get clear arcade buttons and place the LED's below them to flash upon striking (or to stay lit in a toggle fashion) for a really cool effect.

Know the competition: the TF as sliders and knobs, as well as being velocity sensitive. you'd have to market this for either lightning fast cueing in Traktor, Live, etc, or as a great way to control the main functions of four decks in Traktor (play, cue points, etc)

hmm, what other ideas do you have? your main strength could be to mass produce these for the lowest cost possible

[midifidler]

Hey Dan,
The back lit arcade buttons was what I wanted to begin with but the only ones I could find after hours of searching where built for arcade cabinets and all at least 55 mm deep, and generally twice the cost. But with that said, they would look totally dope.

I have designed it to be as easy to manufacture as possible (in terms of labour), the main issue remaining is the cast aluminum enclosure. The raw unit comes in at 55 mm tall so I have to mill each one down to 35 mm, and re-tap the screw holes, this takes me about an hour. I'm not a mechie so I dont have too much of an idea how much this would cost per unit if say 100 units where being processed but machine work gets expensive fast. Other than that if the boards arrived pre-populated it would probably only take 20 minutes to assemble the unit so labour costs would be low.

A profitable price point of < 200 USD could be achieved if I was to build at least 100 units.

For my next project I have been thinking about something which Bento San touched on in another thread. In my mind one of the main limiting factor with midi controllers is the fact while on the soft ware side of things everything is totally customizable the hard ware is defined by some companies best attempt to accommodate every one with one box. Hence you see mods like Moldovers SL, Ean's VCI etc, but this is not acheivable for many people.

What I see a big future in is controllers which are custom by nature. How awesome would it be if you brought a controller with a few basic controls, ie cross fader, channel levels, eq, things virtually every body wants to use, then you could choose from a range of other modules which can cover every particular interface people want, from indented pitch faders to endless encoders, touch sliders and arcade buttons, the list goes on.

With a bit of clever architecture this could be made so even the most screw driver phobic user could add/remove modules at a whim. If you programmed each module with a ID then the controller would know what type of control is plugged in where, and what format the midi data should be sent in. And importantly it needs to use open source firmware to further drive innovation.