Over the past several weeks I have gone completely silent. Though ITP has finished, this is not a sign of me taking time off. Rather this is a result of a sprint to finish prototype 2.0 of my AMUP project (dubbed AMUP air) before a party at Lauren’s school, at which I was scheduled to dj. This party came and went last week. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish the prototype on time – I am actually still working on it.

In this post I will provide a brief overview of the main updates, along with a sneak peek at how it is all coming together. To refresh your memory about AMUP, here is a link to previous journal entries that describe the original vision for this project and the development process for the first prototype.

The first version of this project had not come close to delivering on my vision, though it did provide me with inspiration to continue my pursuit. It’s main flaws included buggy circuitry, which made it unreliable for live performances, and a lack of feedback on the device itself, which made it difficult to control certain parameters without looking at the screen. The physical design of the device itself had an interesting feel clunky as well.

For version 2.0 I wanted to fix all the issues mentioned above as well as making numerous other improvements such as adding new buttons and switches; making the hardware more extensible and robust; developing a more modular software architecture for the Arduino; and integrating deeper into Live’s functionality using the python API.

Here is a brief description of how I have attacked all of these updates over the past month:

• Fixed bugs in circuitry by rebuilding the schematic from the bottom up. To improve reliability I designed a printed circuit boards for the button pad and air sensor components, and integrated new components such as LED drivers, multiplexers and capacitors.
• Added support for direct feedback on the physical device itself using RGB led lights. On the air sensor, these leds provide direct feedback regarding channel volume, while on the button pad they enable the buttons to support multiple states.
• Reconfigured the switches, buttons and potentiometers in response to learnings from first prototype. Added inputs to control quantization, tempo, effects send, along with support for multi state functionality.
• Designed a more modular and extensible architecture for the hardware. Each button and air sensor panel combination functions as a standalone unit that can connect to the main console. Theoretically I can connect over one hundred button pad/air sensor components to the main console; though due to latency considerations the limit is much lower (I assume around 4 or 5).
• Working on enabling deeper integration between AMUP and Live by using Live’s Remote MIDI scripts. These python scripts enable you to access a wide range of Live’s functionality that is otherwise unavailable.

Over the coming weeks I will provide more in-depth overviews about how I’ve addressed all of the areas above. I will also share several tutorials related to skills I had to acquire while working on this project:

• Bootloading AVR chips with Arduino
• Writing an Ableton MIDI Remote Scripts in python

To support this project I’ve developed a set of related libraries that handle digital and analog switches by providing services such as: smoothing data from analog switches; debouncing input from digital switch; making it easy to set-up and read rotary encoders; and supporting multi-state RGB buttons. All of the components in this library adhere to the same design pattern, which will hopefully make then easier to use. I will write-up some additional documentation in a future post, but for now you can find the library on my github page here.