[sdiy] presets on a modular

[Tom Arnold]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 02:22:20PM -0800, Peter Grenader wrote:
> For me, this would be the affirmation of the ultimate 21st century analog
> modular.

As much as I dislike LCDs, I played with some small touch screen LCDs with
an idea very simular to this.   I wanted ( and still want ) to make a
card-cage based modular with a couple of touch screens for routing patches.
You can pick up 10" square ( yes, square ) 25x25 matrix touch screens fairly
cheaply on the surplus market, or at least you could 3 years ago when I
bought them and they *will* register multiple keypresses.  My idea is
standard cards , say, quad 4pole moog filter, quad ARP VCO, whatever, slap
the card in.  It tells the cage what kind of card it is and the LCD
controller can add it to the patching matrix.  The cage would be "standard"
and open so anyone could make a card for it and in many cases you could use
an existing card profile in the controller unstead of even having to write
any new code to define the card ( perhaps it pulls the cards description
from the card itself? ).

I really dislike using mice to control virtual knobs, so the idea of a
touchscreen slider unstead of a knob appeals to me and it would be easy to
save presets and you could see where something was already set before you
tweaked it again.  Of course this would require a higher resolution touch
screen then the industrial matrix units.

I like the LCDs over pushbuttons and lights because the pushbuttons get
expensive really quickly ( 10x10 = $150 *at least* ) and they dont have any
visual feedback without adding LEDs or something ( more $$$ ).  I should
point out that I despise LCDs, but a huge horkin CRT with a lightpen seems
so 80's...

-- 
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 - Tom Arnold -       When I was small, I was in love,                  - 
 - Sysabend   -       In love with everything.                          -
 - CareTaker  -       And now there's only you...                       - 
 --------------         -- Thomas Dolby, "Cloudburst At Shingle Street" -