ElectricRock Blog

Ensoniq Control 16 Undressed

by matt on Aug.16, 2009, under Hardware Pr0n

I bought an Ensoniq Control 16 off Trademe cause it was going for fairly cheap relative to new control surfaces.  The problem with the Control 16 is that it is designed to only work with a proprietary PCI card from PARIS.  So I am planning on reverse engineering it and building a USB adaptor.  First things first, though, it needed to be disassembled so I can reverse engineer the circuit.  Here are some pix for those who are interested.

Control 16 - Before Disassembly

Control 16 - Before Disassembly

Control 16 - Rear panel

Control 16 - Rear panel

Control 16 Regulator/IO Board

Control 16 Regulator/IO Board

Control 16 - I/O Regulator Board (Underside)

Control 16 - I/O Regulator Board (Underside)

Control 16 - Undressed

Control 16 - Undressed

Control 16 - Up Close

Control 16 - Up Close

Control 16 - The Brains

Control 16 - The Brains

Control 16 Rotary Encoder

Control 16 Rotary Encoder

Control 16 Slider ICs

Control 16 Slider ICs

Control 16 - Misc ICs

Control 16 - Misc ICs

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2 Comments for this entry

  • Michael Harrell

    Hi Matt I too have a C16 I would like to use with my computer. Have you made any real headway with this idea? Very interested in this topic.

  • matt

    Hi Michael. Cool to hear that someone else is interested in using the C16. If you look at my other posts, to get it working with PC I had to program the microcontroller on the C16 mainboard with a custom firmware. With that done, and after building an adapter to plug it into the serial port, it is mostly usable (some of the knobs don’t work though.) The main bit of work that is yet to be done is to write a program that converts the serial data that it transmits (in a custom packet format that I defined) into MIDI (e.g. emulating the Mackie Control protocol) so that it can be used with DAW software. I have been too busy for the last few months to do this, but coincidentally had begun to look into this a couple of days ago. Basically, if you’re interested in this, you’ll probably have to get your hands dirty with a bit of soldering and hardware work. But if you’re keen to do it I’m happy to provide help based on my experiences.

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