Erae Touch overlays?

Erae Touch
#1

Here’s a random idea. The Buchla Thunder is, of course, extremely rare and expensive…there’s currently one on Reverb for £4K. The Sensel Morph Thunder overlay is a mere £50 or so, but…it’s rather small.

I recently discovered a documentary/explanation I hadn’t seen before for another scarce and curious MIDI controller - the Atari Hotz.

Last one on Reverb was over £2K, who knows when another might turn up. Similar principles have been employed in ideas like the Theoryboard, but the Hotz did it first, and did it better.

It’s basically a MIDI controller for software which is still available on Windows.

I was thinking that you could probably turn the Erae Touch into a suitable controller/interface for things like this. But although those LEDs look nice, it’s not like a high-res graphical interface, or an overlay. I wonder if you could design overlays for these.

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#2

Was the original pressure sensitive?

(Seems like it could be reborn as a web app, with Multitouch support on PC and tablets…)

#3

…yes, it was based on FSRs.

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#4

I doubt you could put an overlay on the Erae without affectings its feel… though they did mention something about the top layer being replacable (quite easily), so who know perhaps an alternative woud be possible.
but still you would need the erae devs to make changes to support the new functionality

they also said an ‘sdk’ would be available, so that when the erae is attached to a computer you could control the leds … so I could imagine doing something with a rPI or perhaps even an arduino with a ‘custom’ ui/playable surface.
after all you need to run the ‘extra’ code somewhere so that will want to control the leds too

lots of possibilities, Im excited to see whats possible when it arrives

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