Idea! Floor board effect controller

[David]

Been there. Got the T shirt. That is indeed easy to do.

I decided to not use the PC as a front end to an effects switcher because it's just about as hard to program, and costs a bit more, as well as being a target for theft at gigs.

I didn't do a good job of explaining what I meant, unfortunately.  I had a couple of programs for my GT-3 that were called "patch librarians".  What I actually envisioned was something like that where you stored your patches on your home computer and then selectively downloaded (and possibly edited or even created from scratch) your desired patch settings to the controller before your gig.  Granted, this would require some outboard equipment and software, but it factors out the diffficult portion of the human interface equation and puts it in an environment which is more conducive to that sort of thing.  Bluntly, I would rather write a human interface in Visual Basic, Euphoria or C++ over PIC assembler any day of the week and twice on Sunday!  It also keeps the host out of the gig situation.

[R.G.]

Ah. OK, I understand now. It's an off-line programmer, not a realtime controller.

That does make sense. Well, other than assuming that the target guitarist can work a PC...  at least. It oughta work fine for anyone here. In that case, you only need to transfer one bit per relay for each patch, and enough patches to fill up the footswitches. The only requirement is that the PC can talk to the patchboard and that the patchboard for a limited number of bytes. RS232 is what you want for that, as speed is not an issue.

Complexity gets out of hand pretty quickly for an any-order patchboard, and you're right, doing it on a PC is much easier than on a controller with an LCD.

[David]

In my opinion, this just became a DSP thread.  Here's why:

I make the following offer:
If any of you have been following the DSP, ASMOP, Crossbar or any other threads related to digital pedal control, you may have concluded that the general consensus is that this is an extremely cool idea that will probably be a grizzly bear to implement.  The gist of the last few posts in this thread is that if you take the patch definition interface out of a floor controller and put it into another computer, you greatly simplify both the controller and the human interface requirements.  If anyone is willing to pursue a floor controller project where the patch settings are managed and downloaded from an external librarian program, I volunteer to at least create a prototype of the librarian in exchange for help with the following scenario.  After reading the scenario, you may not think I'm qualified to write a librarian, but I assure you I am.  It's just event-driven tasks in tiny computers that are giving me fits.

OK, over at Nigel Goodwin's site winpicprog.co.uk, is a series of PIC tutorials using the 16F628.  One of them (tutorial 9) concerns using a matrixed hex keypad.  I have a test program cloned from this which is supposed to light an LED for each button press.  I'm trying to figure out if the LED remains lit as long as the button's pressed or you have to release it before the LED lights.  Anyway, I can't get the stupid thing to work.  I need someone to scan the project hardware and my code and tell me what I've done wrong.

This librarian will have to run on Windows 98 or XP.  Those are the only platforms I have available.  The development environment would be GNU-type so it's free.  I'm thinking maybe Mingw, Extreme Basic or there's a C++ IDE from an outfit named Bloodshed or Bloodshot or something like that.

Anyone interested?

[David]

OK, no takers...  c'est la vie.     Sometime down the road, I'm going to start working on my own version of this controller thingie.  I intend to keep the patches stored in a librarian on a host computer.  I'm thinking I'll use RS-232 through DB-9 connectors to download the patches to the controller.  Somewhere in my stash is a MAX232 chip, which will make things easier I would assume.  I think I've got a code snippet somewhere about saving data to 628s and 677s.  Hmmm...  that would be ideal for saving patch data!   

I'm not patenting anything, I'm not selling anything and I'm not posting anything (take that, Free Info Society!) 
If I ever get something tangible completed, I may consider making my notes available by request only.  Right now, that's a substantial IF.

[scaesic]

this is all pretty confusing.

is that schem basically just a way of choosing 7 effects (loops) in different orders by using 12 multiplexor chips? (i absolutlely HATE logic!)

I'm not clued up at all due to my aversion to logic, but a simple front end for a stupid guitarist would be to add some sort of momentary switch to each effect, the user could then tap it once which would send a signal down a logic circuit to make that effect first in the chain, and then similarly on for every other pedal. Further, an 8 segment display could be assigned to each fx loop to give the guitarist some visual feedback as to which pedal is where in the chain.