I made this MIDI controller as a Secret Santa gift for someone in the Belgian Maker community.

The person who I had to make a project for, mainly described himself as someone who likes playing music instruments, and he is also a programmer, amongst some other interests.

I've always wanted to make something with sound and a microcontroller so that was an idea I wanted to continue with.

While brainstorming I stumbled upon some great diy MIDI controllers by Gustavo Silveira. He makes all kind of amazing MIDI instruments controlled by Arduino's. And has some really great tutorials too.

One controller I really liked was The Fliper. It's a very accessible and easy to build controller, with lots of big clicky arcade buttons😍! So that was the one I wanted to build.

I mainly followed the YT tutorial and made some small changes. To secure the arduino to the wooden box I printed a small case which slides onto the 3mm wooden panel.

Because the recipient also is a programmer I made some changes to the code so he can easily program the buttons to act like an external keyboard.

Gustavo's tutorials are really easy to follow and all the code is available online. So definitely check his YouTube video's.

And if you want to dive deeper into the art of building MIDI controllers of any size and shape, I can really recommend his course bundle.