After the deep passsion i have seen here for 16 buttons i have been emotionally moved to add anouther button! jks it was actully always meant to have 16 i just forgot to add anouther button after i decided it needed a modifier button so crisis averted.
Thanks everyone for the feedback made me reconsider some things first i'd just like to say that this is basiclly the first pass on ui and a lot of the awkwardness is purely a result of trying to fit it all around the cutouts and header for axoloti i think it can be definitely improved but it's hard to move the pots out of the way or add a second row without creating a lot of dead space at the top of the device there's already more than i would like.
As far as the 5th pot it is there entirely to act as a control and can be reassigned by the user if they really want as i don't see a reason to prevent someone from doing so. Your assumption that it was a 5th pot does however make it clear that putting it some close to main values is confusing so i will be moving it to a more sperate location and properly diffrentalting it with a diffrent knob type.
The was orginally planning on two joyticks but ran out of pins what i think might to on the on a public version an assuming there there remain space after iterating on the layout is have a postion for the joytick on both wired to the same pin allowing people to pick which side will have the stick.
I've considered this approach but i'd much rather have the pins accessible directly and have a object that just truns it into a midi keyboard than implementing all the LED's and gate outputs the onyl reason i really see to do it is if runn the io is going ot be a massive resource hog which i don't think it will be so the jury out till after the first prototype on that.
Yeah software is going to be a big part of this. The project is mainly about creatring a platform for some more plug and play axoloti patches and building on some really good existing community work. I'm working on this with a friend who's studying electrical engineering currently and were hoping get things like a navigatable menu/parameter slection going and some polished patches for sequencing. Although i want to very clear this is probs going to be decently far out on the timeline.
Based on my reading ofsome old forum posts that pin should be 5v tolerent but now that you've brought it up i am unsure. I've gone with 5v as it lets me do the gate outputs easily and the led's are 5v since it's already on the board i figured i'd take advantage of it.
I had a discussion today with my co designer about how we were going to implement various patches and encoders do probably make more sense would like to hear other peoples feeling on pots vs encoders
The extra pots you added sit right on top of the axoloti unfortunately so adding more pots will substaully increase the size of thing unless people are okay with having them orphened in strage places right now it's around 265mmX120mm which is feeling kind of big to me.
Considered doing RGB bbut honestly could think if why you'd need more than 3 colours on those buttons.
CV would be cool but requires a decent amount of extra components and given my realtive newness to electronics have penciled that away for a future revison/at the very least after i have a working prototype of the current featre setwith most of it working.
I envision it as a modifier key akin to shift where you can hold it down while pressing another button or knob to get a diffrent function and hitting it with your pinky felt like a natral place for it mabe making the button a diffrent shape would better differentiate it's function and help it sit better visually.
After going through all the comments here a rough idea of what i'm going to be looking at as far as changes
- 16 steps is a lock YAY!
- encoders instead of pots
- still going to keep it as 4 main parameters but think it might be a good idea to have 4 buttons and leds as a bank select giving 16 virtual encoders thus matching the length of the step sequencer and giving a lot of flexability for non sequencer use.
- + - buttons to move octaves/page between pages of step sequences
- general layout stuff like get it to fit arounf teh axoloti better and clearly differentiating functions from each other
- Choice of which side the joytick sits on if there's room after the shuffling everything around
Thanks for the feedback looking forward to hearing peoples further thoughts.