Hi everybody,
I’m a musical programmation student here in Milan (Italy) and my brother (CionniAsDj in this forum) started me to this site.
As he uses a VCI-100 we just upgraded the firmwire and put the 8 arcade buttons and now I was thinking about building a DIY Midi-Fighter.
My first thought was to use a simple gamepad as oskars did and to interface it to a computer program in order to convert the signals into MIDI data but as the program needs to run in the background I wondered about the latency problems that solution may presents, so I thought about using an Arduino board and a MIDItoUSB cable as shown here, because Arduino outputs to the PC are recognized as Serial data.
This should provide a good solution, but I’m not completely sure about it, so I’m asking for opinions and suggestions.
I like it because I can potentially use any USB device I want changing the TSI files properly.
Thank you for the help,
Alberto.
Still got no solutions for the LEDs, actually. Haven’t thought about them at all.
I’ve just seen this teensy board and it looks quite interesting, even if I was thinking about the arduino because I’ve got an Arduino Uno still unused (Italian board, no shipping costs, so I got one for 26USD).
Main question is: Is arduino/teensy really neccessary or the latency using a PC program is low enough to bypass all the external conversion stuff?
Thank you for your reply, anyway
It’s a little advanced, but the Arduino Uno has a tiny chip running the USB connection that can be reprogrammed to present the arduino as a USB-MIDI device. It uses the same USB libraries as the Midifighter.
Maybe someone has a page out there on how to do it.
Yep, I’ve already thought about using the arduino as a USB-MIDI device but as I wrote in the first post the computer doesn’t recognize the arduino’s outputs as MIDIdata so I’d need a software running in the background or a conversion chip to add to the arduino (Hope I explain myself clearly and that I haven’t misunderstood your reply).
I’ll see what to do, now I’m also thinking about using an USB keypad but first I need to understand how to change the keyboard’s buttons with some arcade ones.
Thank you for your help, you’re very kind
You need to convert the HID input to MIDI output, which requires conversion software. I’ve tested it, and what I played around with didn’t seem to lag, though I haven’t tested loop/sample/cue triggering.
