interfacing to an ableton push 2 controller with teensy 3.6?

Status
Not open for further replies.

dangordon

New member
Hi guys, I'm new to teensy, done some work with arduino, but got a lot of coding experience.

I want to try to talk to an ableton push 2 controller & display, to write my own midi sequencer. the P2 controller communicates over USB only. excellently they provide a manual here
https://github.com/Ableton/push-interface/blob/master/doc/AbletonPush2MIDIDisplayInterface.asc

"From USB point of view, Push 2 is a composite device with a MIDI interface and a generic bulk data interface used to drive the display."

How easy will this be to talk to? they provide some samples using libusb, e.g. https://github.com/Ableton/push-int...Interface.asc#31-usb-display-interface-access

can the teensy USB libraries deal with this type of thing? I don't want to drop £400+ on a controller and find i've got to re-engineer a usb stack :)

Cheers
Dan
 
You need a USB host that can speak MIDI... I believe it's possible but I'm not sure the library support is available currently.

The T3.6 has built-in hardware support for USB hosting but the libraries for it are not ready last I heard.

There are USB host boards that have worked with Teensy 3.x. but I don't know of any confirmed sending MIDI to devices.

This one does have a usbMIDI hosting .h file: https://github.com/felis/USB_Host_Shield_2.0

So this may be possible but definitely not an early project.
 
The original Push and the new Push 2 are both specifically designed to work with the Ableton Live DAW. Out of the box they will not even work on a PC and a different DAW. I know that there is a 3rd party hack to convert the original Push into a generic MIDI controller, but I am not aware of a similar hack for the Push 2. The hack for the original Push 1 involves reflashing the firmware inside the Push, and Ableton Live is still required to do that AFIK. I have heard of people using the hacked Push 1 with DAWs other than Live, but I don't know if it works with things like a Teensy or Axoloti.

It does appear that some nonexistent code is needed to make the Teensy into a MIDI host. I briefly played with that since MIDI keyboards are cheap, but it is above my coding ability. For now I still have a PC in my system to act as the host. An Axoloti will work as a MIDI host, and then it should be possible to tap into the MIDI data with a Teensy. I have not tried this yet, since my Teensy synth doesn't use MIDI, it is 1V/oct analog compatible.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top