Korg Kaoss Guitar Mod

[Prowin]

Hey Guys! It's Prowin again, here with my latest project. Creating a external controller for the Korg Kaossilator.

Some of you guys on HakStalkers may have seen me working on it awhile ago, but heres the details again.

It completely remaps all control, including the touchpad, through a DB9 port to an external controller.

The Touchpad is a 4-wire resistive touch pad, so with a hole lot of experimenting I've managed to seperate (for the most part) the X and Y axises from the touchpad to 2 potentiometers.

Since the touch pad only outputs a signal when it is touched, I used a combonation of a SoftPot and a Linear Pot so you can just touch the SoftPot to trigger the kaossilator.

I mounted to SoftPot to the neck of a XBOX360 Guitar Hero controller, and installed the Linear pot under the strum trigger on the body of the guitar.

Alot of this mod is based off of another mod @ http://kaossilator.wordpress.com/

I started by soldering leads to all of the switches, and to the 4 pins of the touchpad. I ended up with exactly 9 wires, so I went with a DB9 connector.

I then started breadboarding with all the pinouts to figure out how to seperate the X and Y axises.

I'm not really sure at the moment how I managed to get it to work, but it does.

I then started working on the Guitar Hero Controller:

I reused the neck conector on the controller so I can detach the neck for transport:

I also created a PC board on the computer as a breakout board on the other end of the Serial cable. I used Eagle to create the board. And then used the usual print it on laser paper, iron onto copper PC board, and etch it in ferric chloride to create the board. I horrible at remembering to take pictures, so I don't have any :P

I guess I can mention that it was ridiculously hard to make a etched PCB. And that I went through several iterations of printing, ironing, and eventually etching the board. But the final product works, so I'm happy.

Here is a quick demo of the Guitar on Vimeo:

Kaoss Guitar Mod

Once I finish the guitar I'm planning on releasing everything open source.

[Rkiver]

Rather nice mod there. Had the wife wondering what the hell I was looking at when you started playing it.

[Mr Fusion]

Hey Guys.

Bought a kaossilator last week and after a little playing around with it, the first mod i wanted to do was somehow hook up to the touchpad to control it externally.

Came across this post via a google search and looks like you are on the same wavelength! (can't find much else on the topic on the net, just the kmod 0.1)

I am keen to start messing with an arduino setup and possibly using this as a basis for a midi to x/y touch pad interface (i.e simulate pressing the touchpad via a converted signal from an arduino board).

Have you looked into doing this type of thing and/or have any links or pointers on interfacing. Maybe there is a simpler way i haven't thought of yet?

Look forward to any thoughts you may have!

[Mr Fusion]

something along the lines of this may be a good start?

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/2008/05/f...l-pots-via.html

with the addition of a switchable output (so its not on all the time)

[Prowin]

Thx guys!

Mr. Fusion,

I honestly have no idea exactly how the 2 pots work in relation to the 4-wire touch screen. I just tried pretty much every pin configuration until something worked. You don't really have to worry about shorting something out since it's all just resistive values ie: short circuit = highest note on the touchpad.

I've been looking into 4-wire touchscreens to figure out a better way to wire this up.

This is one PDF of a TI touch screen: 4 and 8 wire Resistive Touch-Screen

[musiclover2010]

Amazing man really nice work, thanks for sharing the PDF.