Diy Midi controller

Hi there,
please excuse me, this is a newbie question,

I’m thinking of building a small Diy midi controller to use with my synths and would like some advice.
So far I’ve been using Rpi with patchbox and using it as a midi usb hub, with aconnect to connect all my devices through usb.

What I would like to do is to be able to control different parameters on the digitakt or digitone with 1 knob. For my needs, I think a Teensy 2.0 would suffice.

So my questions are;
Can I with 1 usb cable send cc message to my other devices and also get power from the rpi?
Is the teensy the right choice of controller? Or should I get an Arduino nano instead.
If I use aconnect, do I need to use pd?

best regards

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We have a short guide on how to build a DIY MIDI controller with an Arduino based on ATmega32U4 chips (Sparkfun Pro Micro is a good one):

The Teensy should work as well, the code would be slightly different.

Yes, the Raspberry Pi would power your device and communicate through the USB cable. It should see your device as a USB MIDI peripheral.

Not at all, you can connect hardware USB devices directly using aconnect. Or you can do some processing in PD or some other software by connecting the software and hardware ALSA MIDI ports. This is up to you completely what you do with the MIDI information on Raspberry Pi side. :slight_smile:

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thanks for taking the time to reply, thanks @Giedrius!! :pray:

great that you cleared my doubts, so now I can make my diy adventure!

best!!

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Hi,

If you ever want to use a teensy board you can check this project. It’s easy to program and change the code for future project easily.
I’m using this for my guitar “pedal” :grinning: you can see bellow.20210514_090222_HDR

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damn man @psk that looks great! I was about to make purchase for a Teensy LC but got a arduino nano instead after reading @Giedrius reply. Now after check out what you have done, I might get a teensy 3.2 too! Let me see if it this could fit in within my setup. some nice effects would be great.

How do you rate MODEP as an guitar effects pedal?

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Thanks @idek!

I’m more of a noob in all this pedal, effects and programing stuff :slight_smile: , so I’m still learning.

MODEP and Patchbox OS are very good and powerful instruments, but depending on the hardware you have, you may face some limitations.
For now, I’m using a RPI 4 with only 1Gb of RAM and an old, cheep USB sound card. I have an Audio Injector card that I want to try with my setup and see how it will work.

If you know what you need/want, even with the windows paint app you can make a million dollars masterpiece :smiley:

Good luck with your projects.