I’ve always wanted to put my violin skills to use in a MIDI environment, but there really isn’t a controller on the market that can emulate the feel of a violin to the extent that Stradex does.
Stradex features a SoftPot linear resistor to emulate the violin’s fingerboard, four custom force-sensitive keys to emulate the strings, and three potentiometers for range & modulation control. This setup allows Stradex to generate pitch bends, vibrato, dynamic expression, and incredible range, all while remaining intuitive for the average string player.
This project took me a good while. Sure, there was a lot of time spent fiddling with faulty ADS1115 chips and iterating on key designs, but most of the head-scratching was in the embedded firmware—namely, the MIDI signal interface. Many digital signal filtering and processing techniques had to be employed, including buffering, low-pass filtering, digital hysteresis, and numerous serial optimizations to ensure the controller intelligently decided when to send MIDI signals and when to ignore them.
I’m currently developing a component-level PCB version of STRADEX, which should reduce manufacturing costs in the long run.
Build Video & Demo:
This project is fully open-sourced. If you want to build one for your self: Stradex1 GitHub
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