The Clone - DIY Tutorial

So, jetzt wie letzte Woche angekündigt die volle Bauanleitung für den CLONE:

Hey there guys, just to show you where the whole idea for this project came from, i want to Ean Golden's MIDI-Fighter and his concept of controlling Traktors FX and Transports with this unit as shown in this VIDEO.

I fell in love with the simple layout and especially with the retro-arcade-buttons, and wanted to build one on my own on a budget (>50€!!!).

The Brain

First thing to think about was the "brain", to host at least 16 buttons (digital inputs for you tech-heads). A gamepad like this seemed to suit my needs quite good, and very cheap at 5€, shipping included:

 

and I came up with a layout like this:

using the 4 main directions from the 8-Way D-Pad to add the 12 standard buttons up to 16 controls (yes, there is an issue with pressing left+right / up+down at the same time, I'll come to that later on).

The Build

I began disassembling the gamepad and ended up with the guts of the controller:

and kept on going rambo with it to the very core (the controls are labeled directly on the PCB) :

The connectons to the buttons 1-10 and the D-Pad are directly accessible on the PCB-Board (right where the white cables are mounted). Controls 11 and 12 are a bit difficult, as they are triggered by pressing the thumb-sticks:

These little buggers must be soldered directly on the board like this:

The next step required some massive wiring and of course BUTTONS, which I cose to be those guys, 1,85 € each (33 € for 16 buttons + shipping):

Note for assembly: 

Wire the  microswitches first, mount the buttons, fix them with the black female screw (sorry, no native english speaker here, but this term sounds kind of awkward....), then assemble the microswitches on the mounted buttons.

The Home

The housing for this unit had to be something unique, and special. Harder to find, than I expected, and cost me several hours at a local flea market and 1 € solid cash:

Ad up a couple of hours at my workshop in the cellar and there you go with a sturdy wood plate for the buttons fitting the box really tight:

I painted it black, and aligned all the parts:

The Software

As Traktor can only read key-commands and MIDI-Data, I needed conversion software (I chose the freeware GlovePIE, but there are many others like autohotkey etc.) and some lines of code (you can download it HERE) for the software.

The only problem I came up with were the conflicting messages on the D-Pad, as no message was sent at all when pressing the up + down / left + right button at the same time. I tried to bypass this by wiring these commands to the buttons in the corners, so the chance of triggering the conflict is as low as possible.

The Midi-Messages sent now are the same as the original MIDI-Fighter ones, so you can use the fancy mappings by Ean Golden (The Instant Gratification mapping seems to work with different
 signals though as it works with some kinds of banks mode....).

In a Nutshell

On taking stock, we see that 39 € and a couple of hours later a new device is born from a pile of scrap (or is there really anyone left unsing those geeky gamepads?).

The Future

There is still room for further control with another four analog controls. The PCB I use has 10k linear Thumb-Sticks which you can easily replace with faders or knobs of your preference.

As announced in the preview I look forward mapping the device (will only use it for FX) and shoot a video for you guys.



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