Dumb hacks (#1 in a series of many)

[Fatlimey]

Strap one of these:

http://literature.agilent.com/litweb...988-1853EN.pdf

to the tone arm of a deck (or on the side of the platter pointing at the rim), wire to an Arduino, print out a busy pattern to stick under it, send relative MIDI messages based on the quadrature output (oh just google it).

Voila, relative motion MIDI controller. Sorry, no absolute positioning, but you can scratch for under $20 in parts. Cheaper if you get the chip and lens from a retired mouse.

- Fatlimey.

[BentoSan]

Could use a mouse and HID to Midi software too, i personally feel a laser mouse would provide the most accurate results. While your at it you could unsolder the buttons and solder in wires attached to arcade buttons - so a gaming mouse with a ton of buttons would be perfect for this.

[Foreverhex]

Im actually doing an even lower-fi versoin of this. I took an old (ball mouse) usb mouse and basiclly made it into a belt driven jogwheel/scratch. When you turn the record a belt turns the encoder plastic... thing. I used GlovePIE and midiyoke to send midi signals to traktor. Its smooth as can be. But Im rebuilding the box so it looks pretty and can handle me being drunk.

[Fatlimey]

basiclly made it into a belt driven jogwheel/scratch.

It's a lo-fi battle of pinout diagrams vs. rubber bands. FIGHTFIGHTFIGHT!

[BentoSan]

The rotating pattern doubles as looking really cool if your on LSD lol

[Foreverhex]

I just started on the whole DIY stuff. I looked into a lot of encoder stuff, some for the midibox and some for stand alone projects. Needless to say, using a mouse and a rubber band is way more reasonable for me. I put up some pics when Im done.