Magnetic Strip Resistor MIDI Controller


[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.”

12 thoughts on “Magnetic Strip Resistor MIDI Controller

  1. I wouldn’t do that with one of my current credit cards, but anything old or expired is ruinable. The drivers license risk may depend on where you live. I’ve never had mine in a mag stripe reader.

  2. Wow. I use Reason, and just watching this makes me really want to do this myself. Anyway, I don’t know much about electronic schematics and whatnot, so if anyone would like to help me a bit, either by explaining how it’s assembled or maybe an even easier alternative (same concept), then please, send me an email:

    aeron005 [atnospam] gmail.com

  3. just because people use the words “pencil lead” does not mean that it is lead, “pencil lead” is in reference to graphite, and this is common knowledge. The only time you should state that “pencil lead” is not lead is when they complain about lead poisoning from when their friend poked them with a pencil.
    now that i am done with that, i got lost about 5 words in, perhaps someone could post a how-to?

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