As I have mentioned in my previous posts about the Ensoniq Control 16, it is a DAW control surface designed to interface to proprietary DAW software via a proprietary PCI card.  As I have the C16, but not the PCI card, I have been working on reverse engineering the interface so that I can build a USB adaptor for it and use it with my PC.

I have previously written about how I built an RS-232 adaptor for the Control 16, but this alone did not allow me to communicate with the Control 16 as I did not know its communication protocol. As I did not have the PCI card to act as a master and provide something for the C16 to communicate with, I was not able to sniff the communications and reverse engineer them. My solution instead was to replace the firmware running on the C16’s microcontroller with one that I custom wrote, and which used my own communication protocol.

(continue reading…)