Converting a D8B to a full fledged DAW Controller (w/o MIDI)

[Marc Girard]

Hello all,

I posted on the official Mackie Forums the good news but it seems this board looks more active!

So, long story short, my goal is to convert a D8B into a DAW controller.

Tonight, I successfully hacked on the serial port and reverse engineered the protocol. I can move faders and ask the D8B to move faders for me, turn on and off any lights on the board and write whatever I want on the VFD display.

I'm still very far from being done, but it's very good news! I even initialized my D8B without any help from the Mackie OS! I'm using Linux so far for debugging purposes and I'm able to address the board directly.

Just for fun, I wrote "Hello World!" in the VFD screen, which I photographed and will send over to tease you all!

There's still much work to be done (I haven't figured out the Jog wheel or the meter bridge).

Cheers all,

Marc Girard
http://www.marcgirard.com

[sverred]

Great work Marc! Highly interesting! Keep us updated!!

[Petersueco]

Wow! That sound promising. Keep up the work, Marc.

Any help you need, please let me know.

Peter Holmquist.

[mackdaddie]

Hey Marc


How is the status of your experiment?

Just curious

[Marc Girard]

Hello there,

The d8b control software is slowly progressing! Yesterday I wrote a successful subroutine that drives the meter bridge over 26 channels (through my ethernet software connector which I developed in the last weeks). It looks quite easy to do a meter bridge, but it proved to be a bigger challenge that I originally planned, as the d8b has a funky way to address the leds (not really ordered and stuff). Plus, there's a bandwidth limitation via RS-232 (around 11.5k/sec) so one must not "waste" precious bandwidth with unnecessary data. (Learned that from the C-64 days).

If you want to take a look at the video, point your browser here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NkpEpnkRaA

I'm mostly posting at the official Mackie forums simply because I didn't know about this place until later on, but I'll keep you guys updated!

Cheers,

Marc Girard
www.marcgirard.com

[mackdaddie]

thx 4 the update Marc

looks great!

[Marc Girard]

Here's the post I made on Mackie's original forum, I thought it might be good to post it here too!

--- CUT HERE ---

Hello all!

Sorry for the long time without any news, it's been a real busy December/January so far! I opened up my new studio last November and it's been non stop work since! I'm real happy about this.

Now, on the d8b front, I'm in the middle of doing a new test. I want to connect my dev PC (my laptop) directly to the d8b using the console data port. The reason? Looks like there's garbage running down the line when I redirect all the RS-232 traffic to the networking port. Might be a conflict with Linux or just a bug, still, I want to see if I have 100% transmit/receive throughput with a direct connection to the d8b board.

I'm thinking about migrating all of this thread to Peter's excellent d8b forum as it's getting a little bit weird on the official forum! laugh The new scheme is scheme is so-so, hard to read!

More info as I fire up the soldering iron and craft a new cable to connect directly to the d8b.

Ciao all!

MG

[Rutah]

Yes please keep us updated with videos.. I think this is definately something I am interested in if it functions properly!

Thanks again!

[FrankH]

I thought it might be good to post it here too!

"Move....move where the food is" -Sam Kinison

[Petersueco]

I want to connect my dev PC (my laptop) directly to the d8b using the console data port. The reason? Looks like there's garbage running down the line when I redirect all the RS-232 traffic to the networking port. Might be a conflict with Linux or just a bug, still, I want to see if I have 100% transmit/receive throughput with a direct connection to the d8b board.

Sorry to ask but, what kind of connector are you using at the laptop end?

Sounds very nice to control the console directly from the PC. Maybe we can figure out a modification to power the console without using the CPU...

Keep up the good work, Marc !

Peter Holmquist.