Hello, thanks for all replies and interest. Excuse me for the delay, I had been working very much this end of year, presenting images on clubs (is right to say this?), of course together with my Midi Chicontroller, which is a really good company
Well, the controller was mounted inside a really cheap tool box, but could be mounted inside almost anything or anywhere that fits (from a shoe box to a frying pan). The intention of the tool box is because it open in half, so I can confortably make the maintenance on both circuit side (bottom) and the control, potentiometers side (upper, movable).
The controller runs on a simple and cheap microcontroller from intel 8051 family, I have programmed (coded) the microcontroller and designed the circuit all myself, but I know there are ready projects like this in the internet.
It has 30 potentiometers which sends control change data from controller 8 to 37, all in absolute values (not incremental), actually the display just shows the outgoing midi data, controller number, value and a small 1 char graphic bar with value. The idea is to add some or many buttons to the controller so could control menus in the display to configure it, change some functions, shift the controller numbers and/or any other idea, because I program the microcontroller to do whatever I want
Inside the controller it has basically: one microcontroller (the heart and brain) from 8051 family, to be specific the AT89S52, which has 8kB of code memory, 256bytes of ram and is running at 12mhz, one 16x2 display, one analogic to digital converter, four analog multiplexers, one 3 to 8 decoder, one opto-coupler and some other small parts.
forgot to say, actually it runs only on a real MIDI port, and it is powered by its, the advantage is that only 1 cable comes to the controller.
I'm not that good in english, so may have writed many wrong things, any doubts please ask, or any other doubts feel free to ask. Thanks.
[Edited on 3-1-2008 by VJ_Chico]