Hey all,
I'm a lighting tech and wanted to repurpose an old (but still functional) Jester 24-48 Desk as a MIDI Controller.
The basic idea is that, instead of triggering lights with the desk directly, I connect the desk to my Computer via (usb)MIDI and would use the buttons and faders on the desk to trigger Cuelist inside a much more advanced software.
The general idea is this: have every fader and button on the desk control one DMX channel, take the output of that channel and transform it into midi. A button press would be a note-on/off event and a fader a control change event (since dmx is 255 and midi 127 I would just divide the dmx signal by 2 to get the midi value).
In theory this sounds (relatively) easy, I know how to read DMX In, but I don't know how I would translate it into MIDI. The next software problem would be, how would I differentiate between a button press and a fader? (For every channel, there is a button and a fader). Maybe by checking if the DMX value jumps directly to 255?
And on the hardware side, I don't even know how to begin xD. I know how to work with midi and Arduino and I know how to work with DMX and Arduino but I don't know how to combine the two.
I know this won't be a straight forward project but has anyone any idea on where to start, software and hardware wise?