Hi all! Apologies for yet another non-python email and for the shameless self promotion about to follow. Feel free to punch me at the next meeting :)
Myself and my brother have been working on a hardware modding project and we recently finished. I uploaded the source to gihub[1] last night, so it seems like a good time to tell more people about it. Hopefully somebody on this list will find it interesting. What we did is took the Midifighter[2] MIDI controller, released by DJ Tech Tools, which is an open source (firmware is GPL; schematics are CC) MIDI control surface using arcade-style buttons (hence the name) and extended the firmware to support a ton of extra feature: extra buttons, knobs, faders and LEDs, as well as some software-only improvements. DJ Tech Tools have confirmed that they plan on merging some of my code back into the official firmware too. The additional LEDs are controlled by a PIC24HJ302, which is connected to the Midifighters AT90USB162 over SPI. In hindsight, we should have just bought an LED driver chip, rather than building our own from a PIC, but in the name of learning, it was worthwhile (since I now know the PIC24 datasheet inside-out :D). The atmel microcontroller is programmed in C, while, being a bit of a programming masochist, I programmed the PIC in PIC24 assembly. Photos are scattered throughout this thread on the dj tech tools forums: http://www.djtechtools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28014 The latest photo is here: http://sidetrakd.com/photos/ledtest.jpg A brief teaser video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvvS3nsrv3Y though we will be uploading a proper demonstration video as soon as my brother finishes mapping all of the features to his dj software. We are also planning on releasing schematics for our hardware changes and some blog posts/articles about what we did and our experiences, but that may take some time yet. Official Midifighter firmware and schematics are available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/midifighter/ If anybody has any question about the code or project in general or would like some pointers or help in doing their own, please don't hesitate to contact me (on list, directly or in person at a python meeting) and I'll be happy to help in whatever way I can. This was my first real (ie not just tinkering) embedded programming/electronics project though, so I don't know how helpful I can be outside of answering questions on this project. Happy hacking! Dan. [1] https://github.com/dublindan/Midifighter [2] http://store.djtechtools.com/collections/midi-controllers/products/midifighter-diy-kit# -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Ireland" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pythonireland?hl=en.
