MIDI controller as Ion XE fader wing

Hello!

My community theatre group recently acquired and ETC Ion XE. I am looking for an inexpensive way to have physical faders, as the virtual fader display is a little inconvenient, even with touchscreen monitors. Is it possible to connect a MIDI controller directly into the console via USB and use it as a fader wing? Specifically I am hoping to use the Behringer BCF2000.

Thank you!
Ben
 
Well, yes and no. The answer isn't exactly straightforward. Faders from third parties do work but it's not a straight plug and play situation.

You would need to listen to midi via the EOS diagnostics tab (Tab 99) and then create an event in show control for each midi note received. For buttons, it's pretty simple. Faders on the other hand are quite a different beast. I would only recommend trying this if these are meant to control static faders on one page only. If you want to scale pages, midi via direct to usb is out of the question. You can code it via a magic sheet with osc doing the translation but that's a lot of work, and it might interfere with another osc signal (ie. If you use a wireless app such as oscRFR).

Personally I would HIGHLY recommend checking out luminosus.org you would need another device inline (even an old refurbished pc would work) to output the OSC, but it's pretty simple to setup.

https://community.etcconnect.com/co...rt-midi-smpte-osc-rtc-etc/23773/midi-over-usb

https://community.etcconnect.com/co...di-keyboard-controlling-intensity/94142#94142

luminosus.org
 
Give away razors, sell blades.

Wings -- even the non-motorized kind -- aren't cheap, and are almost never spotted in the wild, for sale, used....

And since that inures to the benefit of the vendor, they're not going to make it easy for you to find an alternate solution.
 
They actually have documentation on interfaces useful for a 'roll-your-own i/o device' and there's a number of people in the ETC EOS facebook groups making them. Button boxes for Nomad are more common but there's a number of fader and knob boxes that folks have made with detail on how they made them.
 

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