DIY ‘midi’ footpedal

Will O'Brien — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:19:00 +0000

[forrest] passed along this diy foot-pedal ‘midi’ controller. It’s a good re-use of hardware, but not a true midi controller. The pcb was gutted from an old keyboard, and the pedals were scored from a mad 60 mile tour of the local radio shacks clearance bin. Since the pedals are simple momentary on switches, it was a matter of wiring them to the controller and using a laptop to generate signals via usb midi interface. Replace the keyboard pcb with a drum controller and you’d have an interesting stand alone solution.

Just so I could enjoy some extra crow, I managed to leave one other entry out of my published list of Design Challenge entries. [Jason] sent in this MEGA32 programmer/dev board. He kept it single sided, but you’ll need a parallel port to use it.

Magnetic strip resistor MIDI controller

Will O'Brien — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 18:30:00 +0000

[Joel] sent me a tip where I discovered this fun hack. It reminds me of the old pencil lead resistor trick. It looks like Ableton Live has been inspiring quite a few original controllers.

From the post: (Myspace doesn’t seem to have individual post linking)
“If you REALLY want to do this, the code is here. It is sloppily written in PASM for the Ubicom SX microcontroller running at 50Mhz addressing an ADC0808 (datasheet) 8 bit parallel ADC, because it’s the year 1993.”

Hack a Day » MidiController

DIY ‘midi’ footpedal

Magnetic strip resistor MIDI controller