WIKI: How to make a DIY MIDI controller easily

Installing and configuring coding environment.

You will need an arduino nano/uno, or a teensy chip. Other chips are supported by the library, but these are the ones I am going to cover.

Here are some links to buy them. The clone nanos Tayda sells work just fine:

Teensy 3.2:


Arduino NANO:


If you have (Arduino Nano or UNO), Download Arduino IDE:

  1. Go here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/software
  2. Download the version for your operating system.
  3. Contribute if you want, or just click “Just Download”.
  4. Install using the downloaded package.

If you have (Teensy 3.2+), Download Teensyduino:

  1. Go here: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html
  2. Follow install instructions on the page:

No matter what, you are going to end up with a very similar looking program with which to code in.

When you first open up the arduino IDE, this is what will greet you:

Next, you want to tell the program what board you are going to be programming for.

For uno and nano this is how you get to the option:

For teensy, this is the path to select your board. if you have a different version than 3.2, select the appropriate one.


Next we need to download and add the Control Surface library to our coding environment, since it is not a standard library that comes with the software we just downloaded.

  1. Go here: https://github.com/tttapa/Control-Surface.
  2. If you arn’t familiar with using github of git, dont worry you dont need to do much. Just click the green dropdown and click download zip.
  3. Next just add the library using the path in the image below. In the box that opens up, just navigate to where you downloaded the zip file, select it and hit the open button. What this does for you is extract this zip and place it into arduino’s libraries path. (This is found in C:\Users%UserProfile%\Documents\Arduino\libraries on windows for example.) You dont need to go through that unless you want to remove libraries later.
    image

The coding environment should be good to go for now!

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