Nerd Alert! My favourite g33k-buddies (Carl Dimsos and Gus the Friendly Giant) and I are at it again! For a while, we've been discussing ways to interact with Max in a fast and precise way. The project is going to be a controller in a suitcase, armed with an Atmega-chip and a MUX-shield which allows us to have 48 analog inputs speaking with the arduino! This will give us a 10-bit resolution on all analog readings which is suitable for controlling audio parameters in Max. I want to have a lot of different and expressive sensors and knobs n butts for varying the input voltages.
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So far I have whole lot of scrap parts from old helicopter remote controls and sensors sensing touch, distance, humidity, light intensity, gyroscopic motion and a lot more.
I've also disassembled two flight simulator joysticks with their own respective D/A-converters, which gives me 7 more analog inputs with 16-bit resolution!
I decided to have this project be a classical aim for those who's spent decades creating music in front of a computer monitor: to have the laptop lid closed and have all the paramters transfered to the controller.
For receiving feedback from Max I am going to use a 16x2 LCD display, as seen on The MicroWaveSampler (another arduino project done with Dimsos) for getting the values from the inputs and the max-paramter assigned to it. But I wanted to be able to see a little bit more of what's going on inside so I found an arduino project called Chibimo which allows the user to have a 128x64 display as an external monitor. (only winXP, sorry)
I've already tested it out, narrowing my patches way down to 128 pixels wide to have it fit on the little screen. I will use a usb-numpad to skip around in the patch to show different parts on the LCD monitor. More to come! Stay tuned and thanks for following guys.
