This video demos Lennon Luks‘ sick matrix-style MIDI sequencer, his senior design project for earning his BS at Western Carolina University.

Luks summarizes the project like this:

This project was to design and construct a hardware MIDI control device that will aid an electronic musician in the performance of electronic music. The main intention was to give the user as much versatility as possible without the need of a helper application running on a computer, so the device can be used to control audio on any device that accepts MIDI data, whether it is a computer or not.

The main feature of this device is an 8×8 grid composed of 64 LED-lit buttons, which can be used as a step sequencer. Another feature of the device is 8 knobs, one to control the tempo of the sequencer, and 7 to control various audio parameters via MIDI.

The device also has an LCD for displaying various settings, the current tempo, and status of the sequencer. Five buttons are used for navigation through the menus on the LCD and for changing settings. Three other buttons are used to control the sequencer. The design is centered around the ATMEGA644 microcontroller and the firmware is written in C. The avr-gcc toolchain was used for the software development.

Luks’ matrix sequencer shares a lot with other designs, such as the monome or the APC40 – but Luks’ sequencer is designed to interface directly with instruments via MIDI, independent of a computer.

via hackaday