Whats inside a Midi Fighter?

[MadCat]

Hey guys,
I have recently been very into building midi controllers and am looking to get more serious about producing them within the next few months. My question is whats inside of a Midi fighter? What I mean by this is, what do they use as the brain? Is it something they produce themselves or is it simply a Teensy, Arduino or something close to that? Any information would be greatly appreciated. Eventually i want to be able to build my own custom circuit boards to accompany my DIY midi controllers. I look forward to your comments.

Thanks

[ReggieUK]

It's a custom board but it uses the same chip as a teensy 2, in fact these days you could probably just use an arduino leonardo. The MidiFighter classic is actually open source, it is basically an atmega 32u2/u4, a 16 out led driver, + a couple of shift registers and an adc chip, you can build one with breakout boards (I did), The midi fighter is a great piece of kit but I went in a different direction, I used an arduino mega2560 and adapted some code for a similar project based on the midifighter layout on instructables, I made improvements and added a few decent (imho) features, for a start the 2560 gives access to a ton of digital and analog IO, enough for 2x 4x4 button grids, 16 pots/faders and still some spares for rotary encoders without needing any external chips. I also added addressable RGB led support with eeprom support so you can set custom colours for all the leds via midi and of course they all react to midi note on/off messages. I also added support for rotary encoders and cleaned up the analog input code.

https://github.com/Reggi3/megafighter

There are quite a few decent ways to make your controllers these days, you can stick purely with arduino/teensy and make a very accomplished device you can easily beat the precision of a cdj 2000 nexus pitch fader with a reasonable quality adc breakout and an 11cm fader. There are midi/usb-midi libraries for a few of the popular boards these days.

You could also look at midibox if you want something a bit more involved and there are a few opensource synth projects knocking around for stm32F4-Discovery boards, check out dekrispator on my github for an example of that, it's a very short leap to be able to turn one of those boards into a midifighter twister/3d style controller as it's got an onboard accelerometer.

[MadCat]

Thank you for the reply. This gives me a much better idea of what exactly goes into a midi controller and its really quite simple. I am wondering if you ever finished your midi fighter instructable? Also is there a link to the instructable that you mentioned in your reply?

thanks again - MadCat