Harley Benton MP-100 for Headrush Gigboard via Arduino Uno

Ingredients

• Harley Benton MP-100 MIDI footswitch
• Headrush Gigboard (GB)
• Arduino Uno or compatible
• Arduino MIDI Shield Breakout Board

Why?

• Gigboard seems to expect Control-Change (CC) messages to e.g. trigger the looper or the footswitch 1-4 commands with a down-and-up sequence: values ("sub-program") of 127 and then 0
• In custom mode, MP-100 sends a CC-value of 127 when toggle mode is off, and 127 to toggle ON and 0 to toggle OFF, but not both with just one footswitch activation
• There's no firmware upgrade for either Gigboard or MP-100 as of now to fix the incompatibility
• → use a programmable device to re-map the values

Compiling and Uploading the Firmware

• use the Arduino IDE
• make sure, the blinking example works (correct port, etc)
• open this project
• add a zip dependency: FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library, i.e. from the latest release source zip
• add the IDE-bundled Arduino_DebugUtils library
• make sure the shield is connected correctly to the board & switched off (otherwise, the upload will fail)

• turn on the shield

My CC Mapping

Use case:

• GB is positioned at the waist level to enable touch screen without bending down
• MP is positioned on the floor
• the setup enables MP-100 footswitch-controlled looping, while also allowing for scrolling through the rigs as well through the footswitch

MP CUS1 set up:

• Footswitches 1-4 → GB CC 50-53
• A → CC 70 (looper record)
• B → CC 72 (looper peel)
• C → CC 69 (looper start/stop)
• D → CC 64 (optional: tap tempo)

Caveats

• no warranty whatsoever
• printing to the serial port for debugging purposes will produce garbage after MIDI is initialized (MIDI.begin)
• you can debug number via the blinkin LED, i.e. via blinkNumberInReverseOrder or your own implementation

License

Copyright 2020 Dmitry Ledentsov.


This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
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