Other than its price that thing is super-cool (and a really nice technical solution to the electrical limitations)!
Unfortunately, it looks like it only runs with the DROID (though thatās pretty cool too) and Iām not sure whether itās an i2c connection or proprietary. It may need to be run by something that has the capacitance limits in mind but something like this which did I/O over MIDI or CV would be very special. Like the 16n or Sweet Sixteen but with motors.
That said, itās extremely inspiring and I hope some of the interface ideas on display in that video stay around!
So I had similar dreams about building a 16āmā device for controlling VCV. I realized the cheapest route maybe buying something off the shelf like the presonus faderport etc, but then you donāt get the hi-res. So I kept an eye for old things with motorized faders to pick up cheap and and hack.
Now for the more technical bits, I ended up getting this broadcast digital mixer āLawo Sapphireā (2 of them). The controller uses CANBUS protocol (like in your car) over ethernet cables to communicate with the mixer. I bought a little canbus device and reverse engineered most of the CAN communication. Removed the mixer and instead have a python program that can translate the can messages to midi/osc. Presto, 24 motoroized faders, 36 endless encoders and a crap ton of buttons and oled screens. I donāt have the screens fully figured out yet, and some of them are dull from age, but itās still amazing, when you do something like in that video.
The faders send values from 0-649 which I was rescaling to 0-127 when using midi-cat and hence oscāelot was born.
The main issue is that most endless encoder implementations have mechanical encoders, and those have poor angular resolution: 24-ish jumps per rotation. Using an as5601, you can resolve up to 4096 changes per rotation. Also, most controllers are going to send MIDI 1.0 which restricts you to 128 levels if you stick with whatās well specified. I recall a discussion here in which Bruce and I participated not too far back about how poorly 14bit CCs are specified. Bruce provided interesting historical notes about the standardization process. Bruce is hereby dubbed VCV hardware history/color commentator.
Yes very, itās used in TV stations and such. I picked up an older model, the mixer is a 19" rack unit, with only the master board and no other cards. That and the fact that it was old saved me a bunch. I hoped I would be able to use at least the faders and worked out that each fader would cost me less than $35. (Still expensive). Luckily I was able to decode it enough to use it without extracting the faders.
Iām staying far from motor faders as electro-mechanical stuff is more complexity to go wrong. With an Hall effect encoder, thereās no physical contact to muck up, and the meaning of a position can be anything the software decides it is. Just do all your +/- deltas mod 4096.
I remember it well! I still think, as I maintained in that discussion, that 14-bit MIDI is in practice adequately specified for professional use, but I am getting more interested in other protocols these days and will be very interested to see what you do with the as5601 in any case.
You may have seen the Yaeltex version 2 custom controllers? Theyāre still in beta but extremely well made. The platform can support a LOT more than the current suite of controller types and the firmware is extremely well written.
I mention it because their flagship custom controller is a push-button detented endless encoder with a NeoPixel 16 ring around it, configured with the bottom three āfusedā and 13 steps. Itās not as cool as the Arcās full ring but itās more practical and you get independent color control. TONS of feedback options and a very responsive dev team.
Yeah, from the spec sheet it looks like a very cool part! Iām debating whether to order a few for evaluation myself.
The rings are really cool. I wish they had a 24- or 32- that wasnāt goofy large but even 16 is nice, with lots of ways to do feedback. Iāve tinkered with programming the NeoPixels on my Yaeltex and theyāre really well designed (need to get back to that project if I can find some timeāI was waiting on some firmware patches on their end and kind of fell of the tracks).
I thought about cap sense, for a while. There are a few microcontrollers that help out here like the SAM D21, but cap sense can be fussy, and Iām not sure itās not just gimmicky feature creep.
The one thing I can think where touch would be really nice would be to reconfigure scribble strips to show extra info about a control when the knob is touched. I think Novationās Remote MkII stuff did that. I never played with one though, so I might be speaking out of my backside.
that thing is super-cool (and a really nice technical solution to the electrical limitations)!
