Q Light Controller+

I use QLC+ for operating small (up to 100 DMX channels used) theatre based shows with a mix of conventional (tungsten) and multi-colour LED fixtures.

Apart from a few standard scenes, a lot of the time the system is 'busked' live (ie the lighting state is made up at the time by the operator). I use a Korg NanoKontrol to provide real faders, knobs and pushbuttons for control with feedback to the LEDs on the device. I wish to add a macro keypad to the system to speed up colour selection with the LED lamps. For the macro keypad I have an Adafruit Neotrellis M4 which provides 32 pushbuttons, each key has a RGB backlight. I would like to be able to use the backlights on the keys to show (approximately) the colour that the relevant lamp is set to. The Adafruit keypad has firmware availavle to allow it to be used as a USB MIDI or USB HID (keyboard) device.

Is there any way that both the NanoKontrol and the macro keypad can be used together as control and fedback devices with QLC+ ?

Thanks

Peter

This should work;
The only culprit will be how Neotrelis has to be driven. What kind of midi signals it expects to get for the feedback to work.
This may or may not work out of the box.

2nd thought - It will get complicated since you have 32 buttons (= 32 buttons in virtual control) and you want the buttons to correspond with the color set onto the fixture.
This will not work. The buttons on Virtual Control have an 'on' and 'off' state with fixed values. So you only can visualize the state of a button (pressed = red, unpressed = dimmed red f.i.).

What will work is a one-to-many solution.
For a group of fixtures (a row on your matrix), you set 8 predefined colours. The buttons backlight 'dimmed' - when you select a color to be active, the button highlights 'in full'...
This way you can read what is put out on stage.

But again - you will have to dig a little bit to find out what midi signals your board expects to get for the feedback to work.
(for this amount of money, you could also opt for a 'working out of the box' Launchpad mini. (Only selected number of feedback colors !!))

The Neotrellis firmware currently does not have any MIDI receive capability. It is an open-source design and there are relevant libraries available, so with the help of a competent friend I think it should be possible to make something work. For simplicity, I'm thinking if note and velocity can be sent from QLC+, then this can select the LED and the brightness behind the relevant button as required. 32 buttons x 3 colours would mean 96 leds to be selected.

I don't think QLC+ will allow the use of two MIDI devices for control and feedback within the one universe - maybe there is a work-round that I'm unaware of. This is why I was also asking about the use of a USB-HID class device as a second controller with feedback, but USB-HID firmware appears on first read through to be much more complex than USB-MIDI.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Peter

So .. a simple fix .. create a second universe and attach it there. The universe a control device is connected to doesn't restrict what it can control. I've had 3 different devices on 3 U ( APC40, APC40 MKII and Launchpad ) controlling everything across like 10 U.

@sandinak - Thank you for your suggestion. I'm sorry for my delayed reply. I will look into this further.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Peter