Pallo
This is a gesture controlled MIDI controller I designed and built as a commissioned work. It has a tilt sensor which affects to MIDI parameters it is sending out but also the color of the ball. I built several stereotypes to get it work the way I preffered. The pictures are from third generation. I am currently putting together fourth generation with better LEDs.
Pallo has two groups of four LEDs: red, green, blue and white LEDs. All are LEDs are superbright. I’m using red, green and blue leds to for rgb colors and white to give white color, as it seemed that creating white with colored leds was difficult. In future models I’m testing true superbright RGB LEDs that shouldn’t have this problem.
The heart of the controller is Arduino microcontroller. I have used Pro Mini -version of Arduino. It is fully functional Arduino without usb connection and built to a circuit board size of a stamp. The tilt sensor is Lilypad Accelerometer and the device is powered from on 9V battery. One battery should last approzimately 10 hours.
The MIDI signal the device is sending out is two different CC parameters that are tilting in X- and Y-axis. Sadly there is no footage of using the MIDI out of the device which I didn’t have time to shoot before I sent the ball(s) to my client.
If you are interested of custom MIDI controllers, please contact me and I’ll see what I can do.
Making of with more details coming soon…
20091004 9:03 pm
Hi,
I’ve build a similar led ball last week using a barduino:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alx/tags/blinkenglobo
I used a chewing-gum box, what’ve you used for the ball? is it a christmas decoration?
Good project by the way, I’m thinking about making a noise box synth next time, and migh use some of your design
http://mechomaniac.com/ArduinoNoiseBoxSynth
20091004 11:13 pm
Sweet. Mine was built inside a christmas three decoration ball you can by from hobby stores (at least here in Finland). I’m putting together couple new ones in following days and there are some changes in both hard- and software. Will probably add more info to the blog here then (current code is a bit messy to be usefull to anyone and the schematic is also more elegant).
I’m also probably building a CV version of this to plug straight to my analog synth.
Thanks for the links Alex will definetly check them out. I’m going to give Arduino workshop here in Finland after couple of weeks and noiseboxes will probably interest many attenders.
20091005 12:16 am
[...] is a fun little MIDI interface based on an Arduino. It converts the x/y movement into a MIDI signal. There is a promise of more [...]