Feature suggestion: MIDI control of LED strips (using wired and/or wireless MIDI)

[ohnoitsalobo]

I've made a LED strip setup for a friend on his 61-key MIDI keyboard, using the Arduino MIDI Libray. It's a pretty simple setup in the technical sense.

There's also the Arduino wireless MIDI Library which is built directly on top of the regular MIDI library, and requires no external circuitry apart from the controller and LED strip.

My basic idea would be to embed a wireless MIDI subroutine that monitors for incoming connections, but otherwise does nothing while the main program runs.

• When wireless MIDI device connects, then it turns off / fades out the other LED animations and waits for MIDI input.
• Run whatever MIDI-to-LED-mapping code
• When wireless MIDI device disconnects, resume main LED code

Something like that.

It's a bit of a tricky implementation, because:

• there's 127 MIDI notes and different people will use different ranges for different purposes - that said, the most common keyboard sizes is 88-keys or 61-keys and (to my knowledge, at least) almost always use the same range of notes
• There's also a lot of other control messages like the foot pedals, modulation buttons, SysEx, etc etc.
• Multiple devices can connect to a single wireless MIDI unit
  It would be hard to come up with a single implementation to please everyone - and especially to scale it to an unknown number of LEDs - but it could be worth thinking about.