To proof that this is indeed a good idea as a midi controller, the first step was to break one open and attach an Arduino to it's inner sensors. Unfortunately I did not took pictures of that process (next time I will), but I was smart enough to make some during soldering.

As you can see I soldered the two wires that are attached to the sensors to a piece of breadboard and an old Arduino Pro Mini I had laying around.

After testing that I could indeed read out the sensors I bought a midi plug and soldered these to the Arduino as well, to be able to test with some control messages for now. This needs to be a simple proof of concept!

It's always a good idea to use shrink wrap to isolate your cables; you don't want to spend all day debugging your project because some stupid wire is touching it's neighbour (happened to me all the time).

Always test your soldering for shorts with a multi meter, it will save you a lot of headaches. Trust me :) So, after ripping apart the original internals, we now have something to test!

You also see a FTDI basic breakout used to program the Arduino, in the final product it's just the Arduino and the midi plug.

That's it for now, I'm off to go program a simple program to send some midi signals! Checkout the git if you are interested! Expect updates somewhere next week when we finished testing.