Since things didn’t work out as smoothly as I expected, no proper information on the net, nor anyone wrote a library for it; spent few sleepless nights trying to figure it out, things seemed doomed.. I decided to contact Spark Fun for more technical info. Within an hour they answered me, was really helpful but tried to answer as much as he could and gave me a fresh set of ideas.

After going through the schematics of the board and its original firmware code, I realized that the USB board has two ATmega328 micro-controllers. As opposed to the ISP board that has only one that controls the LED and button matrix . Basically the USB board acts as an ISP board with a built in “Arduino” to control it. So the idea was to burn an Arduino bootloader onto the Master controller and just use it as an Arduino, easy I thought.

Not so much as it  turned out. I needed an AVR programmer, which of course I did not have. But fear not, to the rescue came the Arduino Mini Pro boards I got earlier, they can be rigged and used as programmers (sounds like a fun party). Furthermore, I had to do a small dirty trick to disable reset on the Mini Pro, basically put a capacitor between the Reset and Ground pins. But none of the boot loaders worked properly and I was getting desperate again. Also the board lost its USB API so I tried to re-compile and restore its original firmware.  And so it struck me, why not just modify the existing firmware to send midi data directly whenever a button is pressed and also light up that button. Of course this would be the optimal solution as I would not need a driver application to run the whole thing, just route the MIDI traffic through to my applications.

After more than 5 days of less than 3 hours sleep per day, endless testing, trial by error and just aimlessly poking around I finally get a MIDI signal and a led on! Victory! The firmware still needs a lot of optimization but at least now I know I’m on the correct track, and can finally get a good night’s sleep without commands and diagrams on my mind!