This is a Virtron the smallest matter known in our digital world and the building block of the virtual universe. It consists of numerous recursive functions that expand in all dimensions revealing its fascinating geometric and fractal form. It consists of a bright polygon core and pulsing outer particles that rarely find stability due to the interference of our physical world.
Try exploring it by rotating around with the left click, panning with the middle click and zooming with the right click. You can also Increase or decrease the number of particles in this virtron with +/- keys. Don’t forget to take a screenshot of your findings with the p key.

Click on Continue Reading below for the interactive app:

After messing around with my own MIDI Fighter clone, I realized that although it had some very useful and expressive mappings for Traktor, its focus simply on the Drum Rack in Ableton Live is little bit… poor. That’s why I decided to create a little MIDI Script that would grant it some of the functionality that Launchpad or the APC has. More precisely Track, Clip, Device controls and of course keep the Drum Rack functionality.

For the purpose of developing and testing in hostile environments, where smuggling in a controller would be hard, I developed a simulation app in Processing, that would send the same MIDI values the MF Pro by simply using your computer keyboard. Also you can control the faders and knobs with the mouse. Simple, yet effective.
Download: github.com

Now back to the Script. It consist of 4 pages, somehow similar to the Modes on the Novation Launchpad.
Page 1: is the General control page and consists of tempo controls, global play, stop and record and the controls to move around the “red box”
Page 2: is the Track control page. Each row corresponds to one of the rows inside of the red box. And it consits of Track select, Mut, Arm and Solo.
Page 3: is the Clip control page, you have a 4×3 grid and the top row is the stop button for each track.
Page 4: is the drum rack pad. It plays the highlighted 4×4 grid in the drum rack.

Also the knobs and faders get automatically mapped to the first effect device of the selected track.

Here is a detailed diagram of all the controls:

Hopefully this script adds even more functionality to this great controller from DJ TechTools
Download: github.com or djtechtools.com

PS: thanks to gonecrazy3000 for pointing out that the preset buttons on the Beat Masher are arranged differently
so the pages would be like this:

preset button 1 =>page 3
preset button 2 =>page 1
preset button 3 =>page 4
preset button 4 =>page 2

Now go out, start a Fight and Loose. Peace!

This is the third part of my epic journey through the world of micro-controllers, MIDI/OSC controllers and all that stuff, and finally I can say that I see pleasing results.

The pad now is enclosed in a plywood case which I designed and cut with some help from Eva. Though the individual boards can be only connected serially, this means that a square 8×8 grid was technically not possible as the first USB board can be only connected to one board in the output port. To solve this I physically arranged the boards in a square, but bent the connectors and connected them with jumper wires in the right order.

Here is the board and buttons layout

I managed to come up with a more workable protocol for the button pad with some good tips from Yiannis. Every time a button is pressed, the board sends a signal of the form #010AFF and #010A00 on release, where the leftmost byte is the board number then the button number and release or pressed state.

To set the LEDs the board receives a command that sets the entire board a specific color if the frame has changed state from the previous cycle. The frame command starts with a command code, followed by the color code and then 8 bytes of frame data. The frame data is split into 4, 2 byte for each board. Then we check each bit to determine if we set the corresponding led on or off. Something similar is going on with the color code to determine which color frames to set. For example $1FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF sets the whole board blue, and $40001000000008000 sets the lower left and upper right corner LEDs to red. Here is a more detailed diagram for the command.

The color is determined from the color code in this way.

And the frame for one board looks like this.

To run the show I wrote two drivers, one that uses OSC protocol and one with MIDI for Duplex in Renoise and Ableton. You can see a small demonstration in the video. I am also developing the [r]otary encoder panel but i will post about it later on ) Enjoy.

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