Mini 16 Button MIDI Controller

This little 16 button USB MIDI controller is made from stuff I had laying around, but you should be able to buy all the parts on eBay for less than £15. Using the MIDIUSB and Keypad Arduino libraries, I managed to get the controller working with multi-touch capability. I programmed the rotary switch on the side to switch between three MIDI channels, and I used the three LEDs on the front to indicate which channel was selected.

I found that some software (eg Sunvox) would not natively recognise the on-the-fly channel changing, but I managed to work around that by creating three instances of the controller using MIDI-OX (free software utility). I should probably have been switching banks instead of channels, but in any case it was a fun little project and served as a nice introduction to MIDI.


Required Hardware

3x 5mm LEDs (I used different colours)

3x 5mm LED bezels

1x 3 position rotary switch

1x knob for rotary switch

1x 16 button keypad

1x Arduino Pro Micro