Handheld music remote controllers

I’ve been working on a set of remote controllers that can be given out at a gig to create audience participation in electronic music. After a year of designing, re-designing, soldering and programming they’re nearly ready. Here’s a video of the first application I’ve programmed for them, a simple clip controller for Ableton Live.

The LEDS light up red for stopped clips, yellow for cued and green for playing and the rotary encoder moves a blinking cursor around while depressing the knob triggers or stops a clip playing. The remotes communicate wirelessly via XBee transceivers using a custom external for XBee that I hope to release as soon as I’ve created a help patch describing its features.

6 Responses to “Handheld music remote controllers”

  1. Fuzzy Wobble

    this is a rad little project. you going to share the code?
    also, im curious to know where you need java and why you cant just use Max for all the communication.
    bookmarking your blog.

  2. crx

    @Fuzzy Wobble
    Yeah I’m going to release all the code and details once they’re tidied up a bit, there’s a lot stuff. The java is necessary because Andrew Rapp wrote a really neat api for XBees in java and I quickly decided that it would be better to interface with them that way instead of passing and parsing bytes directly through the serial object.

  3. Michel

    Hi,

    Can you please share your code with me. I’m designing a remote with Screenkeys for Ableton for private use. I shure can use your knowledge in this case.
    It doesn’t matter if it are only snippeds.

    I normally work with PIC controllers with a C# compiler.

    Thanks in advance and regards, Michel

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