I’ts been a super fantastic week here in Cyprus during the Plug electronic music conference. Full of workshops, parties and amazing new people to meet.

During one of the last day I had the opportunity to do a workshop on diy midi controllers. I designed and produced a basic midi controller kit based on Teensy with eight knobs and four LED buttons.
During the workshop, I went through with all of the participants step by step how to solder everything, program the unit using the MIDI Elements Library and finally MIDI mapping in Traktor and Ableton Live User Scripts.

After quite some time, I finally found a chance to update the MIDI Elements library, improve some features and make a proper documentation for it.
After a lot of requests I added a class for endless encoders and RGB LED’s. Also added mapping features for the Potentiometer class that makes it easier to use with more unconventional sensors like infrared range finders, photoresistors, etc.

And planning to do some tutorial videos in the near future using each component.

*wink wink* donation button is to the right.

As before, you can download the library here github
To install extract the MIDIElements folder in your arduino/libraries directory.

Documentation can be found here.

The Digital Warrior is back in stock now, with a new updated PCB. Fixing some minor design issues and adding new cool features.

The main of the additions to the MK2 PCB now features a midi out port, implemented through a 3.5mm jack, to keep the low profile of the device. By using the custom made jack to MIDI DIN cable it is possible to clock, sequence and interface any external MIDI hardware device. As with all of the sequencer and control settings, it is possible to fully customize the behavior of the MIDI port through the device setup.

Another new feature worth introducing is the addition of breakout headers for easy access to digital,  analog, ground and voltage pins on the micro controller. I’s simply an invitation to modify and hack the device. The device can be extended with any addition input or output components, as well as the expansion board, which through an analog multiplexer gives 6 more rotary pots maintaining the main board’s layout plus access to 10 I/O pins. Thus it can be used as the base module for any DIY MIDI controller project.

This January I was lucky enough to participate in the CTM festival in Berlin. More precisely I was part of the Music Makers Hack Lab curated by Peter Kirn and Darsha Hewitt. During a week full of events and workshops located at Kunstquartier Projektraum and all over Berlin; as a diverse group of extraordinary multidisciplinary artists we had to team up and work on performance projects that later were performed during the last day of the festival at Hebbel am Ufe zwei.

For my first performance I had the pleasure to team up with Ewa Justka and Lorah Pierre, with a performance called CMOS Abuse. The girls performed some neat electronic witchcraft that produced unimaginable raw noise patterns. I accompanied them with drones and glitches produced from modified Arduino and Teensy boards.

The second project was an interactive mobile performance application developed by Jonas Hummel, Stratos Bichakis, Sébastien Piquemal and myself. The audience was able to influence the performance by accessing a website and interacting with particles. For this project I worked on the visualization of the interaction with openFramworks.

Heres a full list of all the amazing Hacklab participants:
Nick Smithies
Ewa Justka
MADLICK
Hen Lovely Bird/Heather Nicole
Jari Suominen
Jiří Suchánek
Jonas Hummel
Lorah Pierre
Schwarzflash – Marc Nostromo & Dorothee Dinne
Mirjam Sögner
Rachel Uwa
Black Spaghetti
Sergey Kasich
Stefano Testa
Stratos Bichakis
Sébastien Piquemal
Tim Shaw
Tomash Ghzegovsky
Leslie Garcia