Has one of you guys ever tryed to control led animations with an USB faderbox?
I ask because I’ve no idea, what kind of data this devices send. It’s not a mouse, no keyboard, no midi device. So how could I sniff and interpret the sended USB data?
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4129/5036878225_a0436dde69_z_d.jpg
I have not tried, but this thing looks amazing! Google image search returned this link: http://lividinstruments.com/news/code-midi-controller Looks like it’s a MIDI controller.
Do have have a different one (in mind or on hand)? There’s the one @Kyle_Halvorson built, which looks useful: https://plus.google.com/u/0/114004081524062063116/posts/cDYuVLtfy6E
Well, all these devices are usually connected via USB and then a software driver on the computer generates the MIDI signals. But of course I want no computer to be involved.
So far I found no documentation nowhere which explains how the raw USB output is structured. Reverse engineering the driver software is beyond my current abilities.
And it seems to be not trivial to get meaningfull data out of the stream. At least that’s my guess why Teensyduino comes with all kind of differnt USB examples like joystick, flight control, keyboard, midi, mouse and so on.
A check of the USB protocol made me drop the idea of sniffing the raw USB data (at 12MBit/s) and hope to just understand, what’s going on.
Okay, correction: THIS faderbox I choose for the example pic has a MIDI output.
If you were going to plug a USB box-full-of-controls into a microcontroller, you’d need a microcontroller that could be a USB “Host” . You’d probably need a USB Host Shield (e.g. several options here https://www.circuitsathome.com/products-page/arduino-shields ) and associated software libraries. Seems like it might be cool – and time consuming!
Oh, I assumed that a Teensy can do that but I learned right now that I’m wrong. So maybe I go the lazy way and use a DMX or MIDI controller where the hardware side is easy (= I have everything I would need arround) and software solutions to read data do already exist. I was just attracted by those fancy lights all over todays faderboxes. 