MasonAsh
commented
3 years ago https://github.com/Hecsall/Raspberry-MIDI-Controller
Some interesting insight about using a raspberry pi as a MIDI controller in this repo.
This project was a little experiment when i was approaching to MIDI controllers. It was fun (and stressful) to make, and i was pretty happy with the result, but keep in mind one thing: The Raspberry Pi is technically a computer, it needs some time to bootup when you plug the USB cable. So it's not really "plug and play", it's more like a "plug, wait some time, then play". Don't expect to plug it in and be instantly ready to jam. This is the reason why i made an Arduino version of this, you can find it (with images of the build process) at this link https://github.com/Hecsall/arduino-midi-footswitch . It is much faster, simple and reliable. So if you really need a custom built midi controller, i would suggest to take the Arduino approach. Thank you for reading, and have fun!
So we need to keep in mind that the raspberry pi route would have significant booting time. We can maybe optimize this a bit with distro choice. I think the fact that we have a touch screen would imply to the user that this device will take time to startup, but we should consider trying to make this process as fast as possible.
We need to research what needs to be done on the software side for the raspberry pi to be a MIDI controller.
Early research indicates that there is a lot of work to do for the CS team.
Here is an existing solution that we may be able to integrate into our project: https://github.com/ravelox/pimidi