After a break of some years, I’ve returned to the amazng little arduino to work on an infra-red midi controller. I was tempted to look at the Raspberry Pi, or even the “Teensy” but had an arduino lying around, so will investigate other options next time round. The IR cost about £3 on ebay and requires only 3 wires into the arduino to operate. About 30 lines of code and it was sending pitch messages out via midi, a kind of “stepped theremin”.

The next task was to send out a CC message each time I pass my hand over it (first value 127, next value 0) so I can use it to switch effects on or off. I’d now like to make it more flexible by having dip-switches to select the midi channel, rather than hard-coding them. Such fun! The photo shows the IR detector (left) and a midi out din socket (right).

time passes…

Gandalf enters…

OK, boxed it up (just about) into an old die-cast box. It *nearly* fits, must check out the smaller arduino variants. Note on the right how I made a hole for the sensor, but at the same end the USB slots in (doh) – couldn’t be arsed to make another hole, so just screwed it to the top. This is the attention to detail that has got me where I am today 😉