Inspired by the great monome and a creative urge, one more idea was born in my mind, to create a device that would be used to make some experimental music project. At first the idea was just an array of buttons like the monome, but then I decided to throw some rotary encoders in, again inspired by the arc. After browsing a while I ordered two rotary encoder breadboards and meanwhile made some tests with MIDI libraries in Arduino.

It turned out that in order to have Arduino be recognized as a MIDI device I had to change its firmware, so I decided to find a work around. Basically all the readings from the board are transferred via the serial port to a small processing sketch, formatted and forwarded to a virtual MIDI port as MIDI data, which is afterwards mapped in software like Ableton or Reason.

When my hardware arrived , I hooked everything up, made few tests to figure out how everything works and was ready to proceed testing. There are 4 push buttons, and two rotary encoders with led indicators, which can also be used as a push button. All that filled almost every of the Arduino pin so I had to re map the analog input pins as digital out. Basically the buttons send a note value, which can be mapped to activate samples or sequences, and the rotary encoders control parameters, each rotary encoder can control up to 2 parameters, this is archived in combination with the button inside it.

Theme song of the project: Camo & Krooked – The Big Rush

Here is the code from the Arduino sketch: http://tomashg.com/?page_id=453