After digging around the Midi Fighter source code, I came up with an idea for a hardware mod. I just prototyped it out on a breadboard with an arduino. I’m not going give away what I’m doing just yet, but here is a teaser picture.
What is all of that?
16 Green LEDs
8-bit Shift Register (74HC595)
4 resistors
A bunch of wire
Also, if anyone is interested in starting hardware modding, I highly recommend picking up pin headers and two mini switches to solder onto the Midi Fighter. It is making my job a lot easier already
nice, interested in this, im going to build a custom controller and im trying to figure out weather i should mod and MF, or get a Livid Brain and build one…
Sorry for the delay in posting progress on this. I hit a small road block.
What I’m trying to do is add 16 Green LEDs (and perhaps 16 Red LEDs later) so that I have more interesting output on the midi fighter. One example would be turning on a blue LED for regular cue points and a green LED to loops. However, there is not enough digital i/o to individually address all of the LEDs. What I prototyped out in the picture above is a 4x4 LED matrix with an 8 bit shift register. This allows me to use only 3 pins of digital I/O to address all 16 LEDs. However, I can then only light up one at a time. You can cycle through all 16 very fast so that they appear to be always on, but this causes these particular LEDs to appear too dim.
I plan to try some brighter LEDs or find another way to address 16 (or 32) LEDs using only 4 pins of digital I/O. I’d love to hear some thoughts from anyone.
We’re using a pic to control extra leds on our modded midifighter.Check out the link in my sig and maybe we can help.Its not quite finished yet though Im at a stand still till I get a new pcb.
