Open Control Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-Powered Control Surface for Ableton Live — and More
With an open source firmware, this music maker's box of tricks could be turned to a variety of tasks with a little tweaking.
Music producer Pierre-Antoine Grison has unveiled a customizable control surface designed with Ableton Live in mind but with the flexibility to be reprogrammed for other tasks, building on his earlier State Of The Loop project: Open Control, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040.
"As a successor to State Of The Loop, I wanted to create a controller with a brighter and clearer display, that could properly show Looper names, Scene names, Arrangement Markers names, and more," Grison explains. "I also wanted that the user could decide how many foot pedals he could use. Sometimes 5 is too much, sometimes 2 is not enough."
After building a few prototypes, Grison decided to take a different approach: While the State Of The Loop, and the early prototypes for its at-the-time unnamed successor, were designed to use foot pedals, the Open Control design went in a different direction — using buttons mounted directly on the board instead.
The finished design includes six on-board buttons, with support for optional foot pedals, each of which has a single RGB LED above it for visual feedback. A large 6x32 LED matrix sits in the middle as a primary display, while two rotary knobs are found to the upper-right — or can be replaced with expression pedals. The microcontroller, meanwhile, is the Raspberry Pi RP2040 — an increasingly popular choice thanks to a low $1 per-chip price and ready availability in a time of ongoing component shortages.
"After designing the hardware, I had to choose which actions each control should perform. But again, it was hard to decide which functions would benefit the majority of users," Grison writes.
"So I decided to let the user decide what's best for him as easily as possible. Right now Open Control is optimized for Ableton Live, with its own Script and Editor. But being open source, it could evolve and encompass software like Logic, Bitwig, who knows?"
Grison has built three variants of the Open Control: The Pocket version, with six buttons and two knobs plus an optional 3D-printable protective cover but no support for foot pedals; a Boxed version, similar to the original prototypes, which lacks the on-board buttons and switches and requires foot pedals instead; and a Maker variant, designed for use with foot pedals or on-board switches."
More details are available on the project's Kickstarter campaign page, where physical rewards begin at €59 (around $68) for the Maker variant with delivery expected in February 2022.
