hey! running's been great. i've been great. its been like, 2 months since... hooo!
3d printer printed circuit board, huh?! what the...? i'm not about that life anymore.
what the heck is this?! oh... that's poop. definitely poop. i need this. is it dark in here? it's dark in here. better. quick test.
oh dear, it's seems like we have poop in thetracks. ha! electrical contact cleaner! cleans electrical contacts, connectors, andswitches! awww... yeahhhh... now the idea here is to take all these slidersput them closer together and build a midi fader box. basically, a digital mixer. one where i can plug into my computer andmanipulate all the knobs and fancy stuff in
my digital audio workstation... by the way, the audio program that i alwaysuse in all my videos, is called, fl studio. now then, let's go design the thing in 3dsmax. chamfer box! shell! too much shell. make a box! make a cylinder! array!
more cylinders! boolean! photoshop! fancy logo! import fancy logo! screw holes! check alignment! ahhhh. it's done.
now, you might be wondering, why 3ds max? why not cardboard? oh my god, did evan finally get a 3d printer? well, let me take this moment, to tell youa few things about our supplier. the 3d printer you see today was in fact sponsoredin part by... my tax dollars, because the rest of it wasyours! that 3d printer. right there. is mine.
i found it first. don't you take that away from me. it's ready! why is it so warped?! way too lazy to mount all these things ontoa perfboard... ah! these are the ugliest knobs i ever seen. every one of these potentiometers will giveus an analog value through one of these lines, provided that we give it power here, and here.
now, i saw some comments asking if we cando a usb midi instead of 5-pin midi. so that's exactly what we're gonna do! this, is an arduino pro micro. this chip supports usb hid, so with it, wecan make a usb midi device. uh oh... slight miscalculation. the pro micro only has 7 analog pinouts. the micro on the other hand has 12. one... two.. three... we have 12 analog inputs.
i'll hold on to that. ahh! these are analog multiplexers. for the cost of 3 digital pins and 1 analogpin, we get an additional 8 analog pins. hooah! crisis averted! i really don't like usb micro ports. they're super flimsy, you can never find themin the dark, and when you do, you don't know which way it goes.
we're using a usb b port. let's plug it in and upload the code. there is one thing we have to be aware of. since we did salvage these pots from an analogequipment, chances are, these pots are going to be log tapered. meaning the output of these wiper pins arenot going to change linearly. slider position, minimum, maxium. wiper pin output, 0%, 100%. here's the output of a linear pot.
and here's the output of a log pot. actually, not entirely true. most log pots are actually two linear segmentsthat somewhat approximate this curve. tada! but the point is, log pots are used in analoggear because this curve mimics what we perceive as linear motion in sound. demonstration. but that's precisely the problem! we're building a midi controller, which meanswe need these log pots to map linearly to
midi values. in other words, we need to turn this outputinto this output. so to do that, we're going to need to calibratea little. split this into equi-distant segments, likethat. then, re-interpolate each segment back intoone smooth linear output. taaa! just a recap, if you're using linear pots,there's no problem. but if you're using log pots, then see thecode below. and that should be it!
let's go make some music. oh why hello there. if you want to build yourself a midi controllerjust like this one, then everything you need is (in the description box below). there's no youtube annotations anymore.
if you want to see more midi debauchery, thencheck out this guy. if you want to send evanz to rehab, then checkout this link. they're here to get me, i'll see you soon. bye.
