As a private project alongside my studies, I developed a MIDI controller consisting of an illuminated matrix of buttons, comparable to the Launchpad that appeared later. The buttons are the size of sugar cubes and arranged in a 4x8 pattern. The status of the button is indicated by its color. The controller can be used, for example, to start and stop various sequences in Ableton Live.

I designed the circuit boards for the project, etched them at home and then soldered them by hand. An Atmel AVR 8-bit MCU was used as the controller.

The firmware was created with C and had a soft USB driver. The PWM control of the RGB LED matrix turned out to be a challenge.