While working on the Mini, we made several design decision, mostly driven by an attempt to reduce the price of the device as much as we could. That led us to ditching use of quite expensive LCD modules (used in mk1 and mk2) and designing our own with all the core Electra One electronics directly on it:
This “main/display” board provides vast number of analog and digital IO via stackable connectors. To make our (Zdenek and mine) lives easier, we made a few IO breakout boards, so that we could design and test the Mini IO board. In a way the main board allows to build almost any type of MIDI controller (with custom layouts), and having all the Electra One functionality available.
I am just throwing this in. if it was interesting for anybody, feel free to drop a line here or PM. I can imagine the Lua API to be extended to support access to the low-level signals. In the nutshell, main board can read 100+ buttons, pots, read and send analog signals out, talk USB, I2C, SD cards, MIDI, JTAG.
The main board seated in the Electra One Mini IO board:
Are you saying, Martin, we could make like an Electra Two, which would contain way more buttons, faders or pots, that could be made suitable for a specific range of synths?
For instance making a physical layout that would work well with any 6-op FM synthesizer (DX7, TX7, SY77, TX802, Opsix etc), in which we use a combined approach, like for instance:
dedicated encoders with a LED ring
dedicated buttons with an on/off/blinking or even multi-coloured LED
or the same as above but then for instance assigned to one or more operators at the same time (so there is still immediate feedback for each of the physical buttons/encoders
and still keeping a screen for all those more in depth parameters that do not need their own dedicated controls, but would remain controllable via '“classic” Electra One approach?
And do the same for Analog or Virtual analog synths ?
I mean a lot of ground can be covered when allowing a standard 2 osc VCO-VCF-VCA approach with 2 physical ADSR’s and 2 physical LFO’s, whereby
any LED turns dead if the control is not in use
any second control set (for an OSC, Envelope, LFO…) can be used for multiple instances of the same (so effectively offering controls for a 3rd or 4th osc, envelope, LFO)
the screen and its encoders and buttons are used for all controls not covered by the dedicated ones. We could get a generic muscle memory controller that way.
