Ever Wanted To Play Space Invaders On Your Maschine?

US This hack lets you do just that and much more!      23/03/15

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Standalone drum machines have taken a hit in recent years. Maschine without the computer is basically a door stop and Akai's MPC has become a glorified MIDI controller...

This hack from shaduzLABS aims to change all that. Taking inspiration from open source projects like the MIDIAlf with CV board and Sonic Potions LXR Vincenzo Pacella decided to build some prototypes were built. However the prospect of building a dedicated hardware control surface from the ground up would have required quite some time, or a particularly long Berlin winter...

"All of a sudden that Maschine MK2 laying on my desk started to look even sexier... loads of buttons, RGB leds, endless knobs and two 256x64 monochrome displays! But how to use it? No, I wasn' t going to tear it apart and cannibalize some pieces, I had to find a less "intrusive" solution."

The project is called MaschinIO and as you can see from the demo video above is more than a little ambitious...

The problem is that Maschine is not engineered to work without the computer. Straight out of the box, its display and pads are all operated by the computer host, by removing the computer you essentially remove part of the device's brain!

But by listening to the what the hardware was saying to the software via USBLyzer Vincenzo was able to essentially speak the Maschine language. All he needed to do then was write a simple graphics library to draw pixels, bitmaps, primitives and font-based text on the displays and use an Arduino as a substitute USB host. Easy right!...

Playing Space Invaders on Maschine came about because the results of all this development needed to be tested and Vincenzo needed to have a little fun!

And so MaschinIO was born with the the dream of:

  • Mac, Windows, Linux, Arduino platform support
  • Standalone operation
  • CV/gate for connecting to analog gear
  • Completely new application logic (which you can write yourself)
  • Full control over the display

So if you cant wait to get your programming head on then get over to shaduzLABS and do some background reading!

Flash forward 6 months and the development is taking place but its just taking a little bit longer than expected!

"the bad news is that it's taking waaaaay longer than I expected, but the good news is that I'm still working on it and most of the hard work has already been done"

Here is last demo application written for the project, a nice little Euclidean sequencer:

 



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