Far East Midi Muay Thai Fighter DIY Project
Far East Midi Muay Thai Fighter DIY Project Posted on: 28.06.2011 by Lorilee Nadalin Hi all,I'm about to begin a DIY project for a midi controller. I actually would prefer to buy the midi fighter pro. However, with the unit being out of stock, and the ridiculous import taxes here in Thailand (80% + 7% vat) I'll just have to wait when I'm back in Europe or US again. So meanwhile I'll have to make my own little fighter with the parts I can get locally here in Thailand and some parts from Hong Kong. So far I already have ordered 30 arcade buttons from Hong Kong. For those looking for these you can go on dealextreme. They go for 0.86USD a piece including shipping. Still need to order the LEDs, resistors, switches, faders and pots. And most importantly, the midi-USB controller. I was believeing of the Hale UMC32+. I have some experience with electronics. But mostly it's with passive components. I've built quite a few guitar effect stompboxes that are still working and made most of my friends jealous. So I'll update you on the progress and ask some opinions to you guys how I should further take on my project. By the way, does anyone know if the Midifighter pro is also using a UMC32+ controller or a more advanced one. I was wondering about this for the LED feedback system. Anyway thanks for your support!! | |
| Lorilee Nadalin 28.06.2011 | Hi all, I'm about to begin a DIY project for a midi controller. I actually would prefer to buy the midi fighter pro. However, with the unit being out of stock, and the ridiculous import taxes here in Thailand (80% + 7% vat) I'll just have to wait when I'm back in Europe or US again. So meanwhile I'll have to make my own little fighter with the parts I can get locally here in Thailand and some parts from Hong Kong. So far I already have ordered 30 arcade buttons from Hong Kong. For those looking for these you can go on dealextreme. They go for 0.86USD a piece including shipping. Still need to order the LEDs, resistors, switches, faders and pots. And most importantly, the midi-USB controller. I was believeing of the Hale UMC32+. I have some experience with electronics. But mostly it's with passive components. I've built quite a few guitar effect stompboxes that are still working and made most of my friends jealous. So I'll update you on the progress and ask some opinions to you guys how I should further take on my project. By the way, does anyone know if the Midifighter pro is also using a UMC32+ controller or a more advanced one. I was wondering about this for the LED feedback system. Anyway thanks for your support!! |
| Lorilee Nadalin 30.06.2011 | Thanks guywithknife! I've looked through the stuff you've gave me and it answered most of my questions. By the way, I've found your mod you made with your brother, looks awesome! I was believeing to start with a proto board like the avr-usb-162. This should save me some time on gathering components and parts. And if everything turns out well in the end I'll design a nice PCB. Always fun to etch you own boards! Now I have to figure out how to take it further from the proto board. I'll keep you updated. |
| Kimberly Lewark 29.06.2011 | The Midifighter uses an Atmel AT90USB162 microcontroller. You can find the MF schematics here. Basic components are microcontroller, an analogue to digital converter, an LED driver and two shift registers. The rest is passive components. For the mod myself and sidetrakd built, we used a PIC as an LED driver. If I were to fo it again, I'd use an actual LED driver for convenience, but we used a PIC because we happened to have one here at the time. We used a PIC24HJ128GP302, but if you're just using it as a replacement LED driver, a super-cheapo 8bit PIC16F would work just as well. The PIC24's are very very overpowered for what we used it for! (We used less than 1% of program memory and NONE of its RAM - everything fit into the registers! - I also programmed it in assembly because I wanted to learn the PIC in details, it would, of course, be simpler to do it in C). You can find my code here. Of course, using a PIC on its own won't help you much because you need to generate MIDI notes, send them over USB etc. I am not familiar with the UMC32+ so cannot comment on that. Presumably you could use that, but unless you match the MF hardware fairly closely, you of course won't be able to use the MF firmware. If you are able to solder surface mount components (not too hard, it turns out), it shouldn't be thaaat dificult to build an actual MF. You may want to etch your own circuit board too, but again, its not that hard. Since you said you've used PICs and such before, I assume you already know all this anyway. In any case, I am interested in hearing what you end up doing, so keep us posted! |
| Lorilee Nadalin 29.06.2011 | PIC controllers, I'll look into to that. The last time I used those was 14 years ago. |
| Marva Cupid 29.06.2011 | I believe the midifighter runs on a custom board designed by djtt. I believe there is a way to use another micro controller (ie. Pic controller) to control the LEDs via midi |
<< Back to MIDIfighter Resources and DiscussionReply