Hello All,
I am new here but I like what I am seeing with Arduino. I am new to the electronics end of the deal but I have a reasonable background in Max MSP and C/C++ so I am not worried about the programming aspect. I've always been a tinker kind of person just not in the electronics realm (yet!). Here is my overall game plan at the moment, tell me if it sounds reasonable...
I want to create a MIDI controller to control whatever software I might be using (big shocker I know 
). I do not like any of the commercially available ones so I figured "I may be able to make one." I want to start with a single channel strip and if it works then expand it to 8 channels (if I ever hit the lottery then I will look into something bigger haha). Here is a list of physical parts I was thinking per channel...
-1 motorized touch sensitive fader
-1 endless rotary encoder (pan pot essentially)
-1 mute button
-1 solo button
-LED metering for the fader and encoder as well as LED on/off for the solo and mute (the LEDs are not necessary but a nice touch)
Seeing as the HUI, MCU, etc. specs are lost in limbo I was thinking of using Max as the interconnect between the control surface and a DAW. I would connect the surface to Max using the HID object and from there go to whatever DAW I need (or even something completely different). The implementation of the different protocols changes depending on what DAW you are using so I figured configuring Max would be a lot easier than accounting for every DAW in Andruino (it would also save space too). While I am fairly sure the DAWs will only output a resolution of 127 steps (MIDI) I could possibly interpolate between the steps, through Max, to have increased resolution to make things smoother (would depend on the faders resolution).
Does this at all sound practical (on the electronics end) especially if I start to expand to more channel strips? What pieces of hardware would you all recommend?
~PB
FYI I am not looking to pass any audio data at the moment.