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.

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While working on my control 16 project I realised I would need to replace the firware of the onboard microcontroller, an AT89C52.  Unfortunately, the AT89C52 is a mission to program (as it is parallel programmable only) so I have replaced it with an AT89S52, which supports in-circuit serial programming.  What I still lacked was an ISP programmer; however, instead of building one I made use of an old Xilinx DLC5 parallel port JTAG cable (schematic).  This was fairly straight forward under Ubuntu 9.04, using UISP AVR and AT89S programming software.  The following instructions assume the target is self powered and has an oscillator/crystal connected if required. NB these instructions are written from memory, so if you find a mistake please post a comment.

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