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Tudor Davies
Tudor is a techie turned manager who fights like mad to keep his tech skills honed and relevant. Everything from web hosting, networking, *nix and the like. Constantly developing and co-ordinating with others to make the web a better (and easier to use) place.
Monday, 13th Jun 2011
Posted @ 08:08
So I have been playing around with the Front Panel Designer and have come up with a few layouts and a few problems.
With my original build, I wanted to combine the DM2 and the X-Session Pro into 1 case. However, the PCB layout of the X-Session Pro means that this really isnt possible unless I mount the PCB on the bottom of the case and wire everything to the panel. This might be the way I have to go but unfortunately makes the unit massive!
These are moving away from the DM2 rebuild (I suspect I shall build several boxes in order to get things right). As my main focus when DJing live is to use MixMeister, I have put something together that is usable specifically to me but would be applicable to other applications as well.
200mm x 200mm Box layout
2U Rack layout
Both of those are identical. They have 4 sets of controls - 1 for each strip in Mixmeister. A volume fader and pots for low, mid and high. It also has 4 buttons (which will be mapped to overlays) and also incorporates a touchpad.
Project Box
That last one is sized to fit in an ABS project box that is 240mm x 190mm x 60mm. At the moment, this is my favoured layout. It retains the 4 strip controls and touchpad but increases the buttons to 9. Essentially I can acheive this with my PS/2 -> USB modified touchpad and the faders, pots and buttons can be controlled using an Arduino, a MUX breakout and a USB to MIDI adapter. The shopping list for this will be:
Arduino Duemilanove
Arduino MUX Breakout and how to use it
4x 10K Linear Potentiometers (60mm)
4x Fader Knobs
12x 10K Potentiometers
12x Potentiometer Knobs
9x Arcade Buttons (24mm)
2x Arcade Buttons (16mm)
USB to MIDI adapter (or similar) and how to use it
PS/2 Trackpad from laptop
PS/2 to USB adapter
The Arduino comes with 14 digital and 6 analog ports. The MUX uses 4 digital pins and 1 analog pin.
The MIDI board uses 1 digital pin.
9 buttons will use 9 digital pins.
Thats all the digital pins used up!
It is also possible to use a dedicated USB/Midi PCB that is capable of driving the whole shebang (bar the touchpad) without me requiring to do any coding, which might be an option :)
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