DIY midi foot controller

[John Egerton]

Hey guys...

A few months ago I traded my marshall in and bought a line6 flextoneIII Plus and a line6 HD147.

I've finally managed to be able to tweak my sound to my liking using these amps...

However I have a vast amount of pedals to use on stage and so purchasing a rather large line6 floorboard to control various features is beyond my needs...

The line6 amps can store 36 presets however only 4 can be stored directly on the amp controls or by using the ultra compact floor controller.

I was wondering If it was possible to contruct a compact box with about 10 switches to store 10 presets?  is this possible?

I understande I can use a Behringer foot pedal to control it however that one is also huge and has way to many features for my needs...

Thanks


John

[william]

You can use midi to change patches, so yea, you could.  Checkout the Midibox pages at www.ucapps.de.  You can twist that thing into doing pretty nearly anything through midi.

[bwanasonic]

There are a couple of bare bones commercial midi foot controllers that don't take up too much floor space and are relatively cheap. You might be able to use the TC G minor footswitch. The Tech 21 MIDI Mouse is another you should check out.

http://www.tech21nyc.com/midimouse.html

Kerry M

[12afael]

search at www.ucapps.de there is a midi switcher
http://www.ucapps.de/floorboard.html

[piano boy]

it's pretty easy to wire up a basic stamp II microprocessor to send midi.  The stamp will also read whether a connection (i/e switch) is open or closed. I did a "knob" box for synths that read pots and buttons and sent midi...used a basic stamp II ($49) and a carrier board ($24).  I also did an organ pedal board, which is a more musical version of a lot of stomp box switches

Course you could go whole hog and get into PIC programming and do it a lot cheaper...

carrier http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=27120
chip http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=BS2-IC
Download manual and programming software from www.parallax.com.

my old page http://web.archive.org/web/20030402131713/http://www.geopath.com/~jraden/knobs.html

good backgrounder
http://www.audiomulch.com/midipic/

[KORGULL]

Here's a cheap, non-DIY idea: find an old second hand multi-effect floor pedal unit with a MIDI out port and is capable of sending program change messages.
I have an old Digitech RP-1 that I use to control a rack multi-effect. The RP-1 is all metal and very solid with 12 footswitches ( 1 is for bypass) and measures something like 16"x7"(estimate) and can be had very cheaply these days.

[terabzter]

OT : I have worked a little bit with a PIC16F84 chip on my school, and a project I worked out is a system that can controll 8 relays.

It works great, but I really would love to make a midi controller. I dont need doozen banks and presets, but 3 or more preset buttons, some banks, but I must be able to program the presets. All prosjects I have found has pre programmed presets.

I'm not an expert i midi, but I sure could make a controller like this.

[David]

it's pretty easy to wire up a basic stamp II microprocessor to send midi.  The stamp will also read whether a connection (i/e switch) is open or closed. I did a "knob" box for synths that read pots and buttons and sent midi...used a basic stamp II ($49) and a carrier board ($24).  I also did an organ pedal board, which is a more musical version of a lot of stomp box switches

Course you could go whole hog and get into PIC programming and do it a lot cheaper...

carrier http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=27120
chip http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=BS2-IC
Download manual and programming software from www.parallax.com.

my old page http://web.archive.org/web/20030402131713/http://www.geopath.com/~jraden/knobs.html

good backgrounder
http://www.audiomulch.com/midipic/

Share the knowledge, don't hoard!
Tell us more about that pedalboard!

[ESPguitar]

Piano Boy, can you pleas tell us more about this Parallax stuff?

Thanks,
RB

[piano boy]

Here' s the wayback reference to the pedalboard

http://web.archive.org/web/20020412215933/www.geopath.com/~jraden/pedals/stampPedal.html

I dug it out of the closet and shot pictures this morning, and will get them to a site when my stupid cf reader starts working.

I've rebuilt them, hooking each switch up to a Stamp input pin. This makes them polyphonic, but limits how many pedals you can support. I also have a set of Hammond spinet pedals I'm going to transplant the Stamp to, as they are smaller.

About the Parallax Stamp II...you hook it up to a PC by a serial or usb connection, write you code in an editor (simple basic language) and send it to the Stamp to run.   The stamp runs that code till you put something else in it. It remembers the code whether you have power to it or not. It can be powered by a 9 volt battery. You can put in debug statements and watch them on the PC. Once you have the code running, you throw the pc away

Stamp Basic has a button statement that handles most of the overhead of reading a button push, and should make for very tight code if you wire the stamp to some stompbox switches. Then just steal the midi serialout code from my knob box application, substitute the midi bytes you want send, and you should be up. I think you wire a small ohm resistor in series with the switch to protect the pin from a dead short, but better yet see the Stamp I manual page on the Button command which I think has a circuit example.

I'll get the images up later today...got them off the card, just need to find a place to stick them.

Other questions?

[piano boy]

http://www.hbcomm.net/users/johnc/pedalboard/joe.html

has the pictures I took yesterday of the pedalboard.

You can't read the program back out of the Stamp II, and the pc that has the sourcecode was a 386sx that has gone belly up, so I can't post that till I re-write it.  :?

In the brains2 picture you can see I'm using a wallwart to power the unit, and have the serial programming cable plugged into it.

I just noticed the bottom picture is titled reedswitch, but it is really another picture of the StampII, with my son William pointing to the power connector and the small resistors to protect the inputs from shorts. I'll fix that title after work today.