Novation Launchpad, ableton button matrix controller Einstellungen

[Phatline]

http://www.ableton.com/nl398-launchpad


jetzt wart ma noch auf Max for live und an stepsequencer der da drauf läuft (IMG:style_emoticons/default/devil.gif)

weil um:

ricing is expected to be around USD 199 (MAP)/149 EUR (VAT not included).

+max for live- wos noch immer keinen preis oder release datum gibt..... wär das mit den:

Launchpads are designed to work together, with up to six units at once

ein echt fetter drumsequencer.... HEILIGE KUH

[Phatline]

Ich bin ja schon daran gescheitert 4 Launchpads zusammen zu schließen um einen 16x16 Stepsequencer zu erzeugen (ähnlich monome 256 nur in ROT ORANGE GRÜN), nur war das updaten der Launchpads immer ein Horror - einfach zu langsam - du hast ne Taste gedrückt, und keine Ahnung eine Sekunde später gabs erst optisches Feedback... ich tippte damals auf MAX/Ableton als Schuldigen....

ABER wie sich herausstellt hat Novation einen spot billigen 8bit Microcontroller verbaut, der auf einem "low speed mode" von USB 1.1 übertragt und grad mal 800bytes pro Sekunde rüber schaufelt --- und dann habens sies noch geschafft ein Oberarschiges übertragungsformat zu schreiben, das ein Update der gesammten Matrix auf 200ms verlangsamt (*4=800ms)

Genaueres Hierzu noch mal rauskopiert > um festzuhalten welche Sparifrohs die Novation Habschis sind:

auf www.illuminatedsounds.com

eine Person hat die Firmware downgeloadet und äußerte sich dazu:

Hi. I am currently messing around with the launchpad on linux and looked at the specifications. My first reaction was “holy s**t, the protocol they designed is utter crap !”

I mean, updating all the LEDs with 4 intensity level would optimally take 40 bytes, but somehow they can’t update the whole thing in less than 200 milliseconds ! I know USB 1.1 data rate is not so great, but come on !

Moreover, they are using some kind of half-assed MIDI format for communication, which is not actually MIDI so you need a special driver so it can communicate with the rest of the world. What’s the point of using MIDI messages in the first place, then ?

I see in the comments that you were planning to mess around with the firmware. Did you do anything on that part ? I think the launchpad would benefit greatly from a complete rewrite of the firmware …

darauf hin hat sich ein Entwickler vom Launchpad dazu geäusert:

Hi there. I designed the Launchpad electronics and firmware, so that PCB is/was my handiwork. There were good reasons for doing it this way back in 2008, when the design cycle started.

For economic reasons, we used an eight-bit processor that runs a variant of USB 1.1 called ‘low-speed USB’. It’s designed for economical eight-bit microcontrollers that cannot handle the transfer rates of full-speed USB, where interrupts come every millisecond and can spill hundreds of bytes of data at you. Hence it’s hamstrung to 800 bytes per endpoint per second. That’s 400 MIDI messages if you use your own spec; 200 if you insist on being class compliant. This is why we picked the former. I still think that the protocol we devised with Ableton is a good manoeuvre around the limitations of the hardware. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to revisit the design and make it better, but there’s always so much to do.

Antwort des "Hackers":

@ben: thanks for the insight on design choices ! So this low-speed USB thing put a hard limit at 800bytes/sec.

Then, with such a limit in mind, why is communication done with not fully compliant 2 or 3 bytes MIDI messages ? I would understand this choice if it made the device a regular MIDI-USB controller that can be used without any drivers, but it doesn’t seems to be the case.

My guess is: you guys started with a nice regular MIDI controller in mind, but then you had to lower the cost and go for the low-speed USB thing. Suddenly you were stuck with a 200 MIDI messages/sec, which is definitely not enough. But it was already pretty late on the development cycle, so you improved the protocol quite a bit with the 2 bytes MIDI messages trick. By doing so, you had to drop the MIDI compliance, thus introducing a driver on the computer side.

darauf hin der Entwickler:

Hello again, and apologies for leaving you hanging on for a month: Novation are keeping me fruitfully busy!

Anyway, to tackle the questions, we started with the microcontroller we used in Nocturn, which was more than adequate for the task, as we’d already proved this concept with Nocturn. So it was designed from the ground up with this compromise in mind. It meant we could keep the cost and development time of Launchpad down, making it economical enough to make and sell, and getting it to market fairly rapidly.

This may seem like a strange decision until you remember our rationale at the time: remember, this was conceived as an Ableton controller, and although we published the full MIDI spec, we didn’t anticipate the huge general appeal it would have as a hackable controller — especially in the Linux community. If we had seen this coming, we would certainly have given more thought to upping the chip’s spec to make it more versatile than it is, although this would also have compromised the retail price, and one has to sell products to survive! We don’t make life more difficult for our customers deliberately; it just so happens that the best decisions are frequently made in hindsight.

We have already moved to a new generation of microcontroller for the next range of products (so watch this space!): I can’t really say what the future will hold but we’ll definitely be leaving low-speed USB behind forever. The economics of supply and demand have pretty much levelled the cost discrepancies between many of these microcontrollers, and one can now buy 32-bit technology that can handle full-speed USB fairly cheaply. This wasn’t the case two years ago.

verdammte sparmeister - ich mein die Gewinnspanne ist so und so gewaltig bei so einen Teil.
PCB erstellung, Bestückung, "Backen", Testen, => sicherlich 95% Automatisiert
Zusammenbauen der 3 Teile und 8 Schrauben = 1 Minute Arbeit wenn überhaupt.
Testen = vermutlich automatisiert.
Optische Kontrolle '= Fließband Arbeit in Sklavenland ihrere Wahl.

Die Verdammten großen Firmen halt!

Der Beitrag wurde von Phatline bearbeitet: 11 Jan 2011, 23:38