Volume Controller Rejects Skeumorphism, Embraces The Physical

The volume slider on our virtual desktops is a skeuomorphic callback to the volume sliders on professional audio equipment on actual, physical desktops. [Maker Vibe] decided that this skeuomorphism was so last century, and made himself a physical audio control box for his PC.

Since he has three audio outputs he needs to consider, the peripheral he creates could conceivably be called a fader. It certainly has that look, anyway: each output is controlled by a volume slider — connected to a linear potentiometer — and a mute button. Seeing a linear potentiometer used for volume control threw us for a second, until we remembered this was for the computer’s volume control, not an actual volume control circuit. The computer’s volume slider already does the logarithmic conversion. A Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32S3 lives at the heart of this thing, emulating a Bluetooth gamepad using a library by LemmingDev. A trio of LEDs round out the electronics to provide an indicator for which audio channels are muted or active.

Those Bluetooth signals are interpreted by a Python script feeding a software called Voicmeeter Banana, because [Maker Vibe] uses Windows, and Redmond’s finest operating system doesn’t expose audio controls in an easily-accessible way. Voicmeeter Banana (and its attendant Python script) takes care of telling Windows what to do. 

The whole setup lives on [Maker Vibe]’s desk in a handsome 3D printed box. He used a Circuit vinyl cutter to cut out masks so he could airbrush different colours onto the print after sanding down the layer lines. That’s another one for the archive of how to make front panels.

If volume sliders aren’t doing it for you, perhaps you’d prefer to control your audio with a conductor’s baton. 

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Building A Wireless Motorized Fader For Lighting Control

Motorized faders are very cool, and you can find them in everything from expensive mixing desks to high-end video editing decks. If you want to build your own wireless motorized fader controls for your own projects, you might like this project from [Ian Peterson].

Faders are useful controls, but they’re usually very one-way devices—you set them to what you want, and that’s it. However, motorized faders are a little fancier. You can move them yourself, or they can be moved under the command of other hardware or software—making a control change automatically that is still visible to the human in front of the control panel.

[Ian Peterson] built his OSCillator motorized fader for his work with lighting consoles in theater contexts. Its name references the Open Sound Control (OSC) platform which is commonly used across various lighting consoles. His build relies on an ESP32 to run the show, which communicates with other lighting hardware via WiFi. The microcontroller is responsible for reading the position of the fader and built-in button, and sending the relevant commands to other lighting devices on the network. At the same time, it must also listen to commands from lighting consoles on the network and update the motorized fader’s position in turn if the relevant control it’s mapped to has been changed elsewhere.

If you’re working in theater or film and you’re wanting to control lighting cues wirelessly, a tool like this can really come in handy. We don’t see a lot of motorized faders in DIY projects, but they pop up now and then.

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Open Source Fader Bank Modulates Our Hearts

Here at Hackaday, we love knobs and buttons. So what could be better than one button? How about 16! No deep philosophy about the true nature of Making here; [infovore], [tehn], and [shellfritsch] put together a very slick, very adaptable bank of 16 analog faders for controlling music synthesis. If you don’t recognize those names it might help to mention that [tehn] is one of the folks behind monome, a company built on their iconic grid controller. Monome now produces a variety of lovingly crafted music creation tools.

Over the years we’ve written about some of the many clones and DIY versions of the monome grid controller, so it’s exciting to see an open source hardware release by the creators themselves!

The unambiguously named 16n follows in the footsteps of the monome grid in the sense that it’s not really for something specific. The grid is a musical instrument insofar as it can be connected to a computer (or a modular synth, etc) and used as a control input for another tool that creates sound. Likewise, the 16n is designed to be easily integrated into a music creation workflow. It can speak a variety of interfaces, like purely analog control voltage (it has one jack per fader), or i2c to connect to certain other monome devices like Ansible and Teletype. Under the hood, the 16n is actually a Teensy, so it’s fluent in MIDI over USB and nearly anything else you can imagine.

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