So I’ve been playing with an arduino lately – with the help of pure dyne to connect to it.
The arduino is a toy for hacker – for hardware hacker or electronic enthusiast. I got it on ebay with an lcd screen with it and since I am starting to built a midi mixer (with some doepfer diy kit) I wanted to test some knobs and pots actions.
I’m not at the point to send signals from the arduino to the computer just yet – I am sure it’s not hard but haven’t been there. So in order to test any knob action I decided to use the lcd. To make thing even easier I bough some premade potentiometer with a shield that connects the potentiometer to the arduino. I agree that is being really lazy because when you start using the arduino you find quite early that connecting a switch or a potentiometer is the ‘hello world’ of arduino, or in layman term ‘it just take 3 wires and a resistance’. Cutting the crap here is what I did:
- arduino mega board
- 9v battery connector
- shield for knobs and sliders
- LCD shield to show the result
Without any idea of what I was doing I made a sandwich with the 3 board, stacking the sensor shield in between the arduino and the lcd shield, then connecting a knob to the first connection. I loaded the default example that comes with the lcd screen. At first the button on the screen wouldn’t work anymore. I realized that it was connecting on the same ‘in’ as my potentiometer. So playing around with the potentiometer I saw it was changing something on the screen! Hurray! 
Hacking the example a little, to create something that make sense I ended up prototyping a volume knob that would indicate the level on the lcd screen. That was fun!
It was fun to realized that the shield are stack-able. Of course at this point this system is not usable it was mostly to test the interactivity with some knob action. Since I got an Arduino I can’t realize how easy it is to create fun stuff. This is also my first step at creating a complete usd midi mixer system to work with Mixxx
