There are plenty of pieces of gear out there with a single (or few) controls. The Presonus Faderport is the first to come to mind, but even the Korg PadKontrol only has two knobs.

The idea here was to expand the use of devices such as that. Pressing one key would activate the controller for one MIDI CC command, but then pressing another key would assign the controller to another. All the while, Pure Data manages the transition, and stores the controller values. This is less useful for faders and standard pots, but more intended for rotary controllers and jog wheels.

I’m personally expanding this to use with TouchOSC – I find that using the touch faders there are fine, but the pot/knob “turning” emulation to be lacking, and difficult to control. This is a step toward having both a nice touch interface, and a rotary controller for certain situations.

Lastly, I seem to recall (or, maybe just dreamt) someone creating a custom enclosure for a monome with two powermate knobs embedded beside it. I think that the powermate hardware matches the aesthetic of the monome quite well. There are some things you just can’t do with a grid of buttons, and pairing both in PureData could yield some interesting results.

How to use a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator as a midi
controller using RBC9’s custom driver & acousmodule’s 3D Midigator VST

However, it’s not even working fully for me. The driver’s developer, RBCP, disappeared off the 3DConnexions forum quite a long time ago now and it still has some problems. It usually cannot be uninstalled the way you normally uninstall a driver. Your computer just hangs… I’m enough of a PC tech that, after problems, I got it off my system cleanly and re-installed but it doesn’t quite install correctly – there’s supposed to be 3 HID drivers representing the SpaceNav as a mouse, a keyboard and a joystick/game interface (thereby representing all of the possible outputs the driver can perform, as set up by the user in the little .exe app that comes with the driver to configure various useage templates (which load automatically with the appropriate application it’s assigned to, which is nice).

The next step is using AccousModule’s 3DGator VST plug-in to assign midi CCs to the 6 axes of the 3D mouse. The instructions for the VST indicate how you should set up an template in RBC9’s little application so that it’ll send the correct data to the VST which then sends it along wherever as midi.

The VST .zip actually comes with a template. The settings in the template do NOT match the settings that you’re instructed to use mysteriously, and the template is clearly corrupted somehow as some of the settings are nonsense.

Using the settings in the template for use with the VST as AcousModules’ instructions state does NOT work for me. Not fully, anyways. Some axes can be assinged CCs, some can’t. Also, something crazy is going on in the driver as some sort of keystrokes are being sent into my DAWs as they quite frequently react as though I’ve pressed a shortcut for some command. I can’t track down what shotcut/command combos that they’re receiving otherwise I’d just unmap those key combinations ;)

So, after that caveat: the Space Navigator is an incredibly well-engineered piece of kit! It’s so comfortable, ready to be used with great precision with your non-mousing hand. As it’s 3D it’s perfect for mixing surround or, like I frequently do, automate 3D binaural panorama positioning – live! The “knob” even pulls “upwards” which I was impressed by. Consider the “neutral” position to be at the center of a sphere. The other 3 axes are “turning” the thing like a knob, which is a little more fiddly to deal with. But seriously aside from a VR Glove what else gives you 6 independent axes of control for midi CC automation?

It’s like the 3D expression pedal I dreamed about for the last decade. I wish it were wireless. And had a driver made by the actual manufacturer that was worth a damn. I imagine you could easily find some happy users on CDM’s sister site, though. Tons of CAD software and the life is supported.

Sorry for the extra-long comment but I figured I could help smooth a potentially bumpy path for others.

Plus, it looks like something off the bridge of the Enterprise, and really, isn’t that what everyone wants?

The only thing that turns me off is the price. $60 for one unit? I guess you’d really only need one or two, but still…