New Arduinoboy from XIWI Electronics

For the last few years I have been abusing the Arduinoboy Midiout feature in my sets to control my external midi gear with my Nintendo Game Boy running LSDJ. This has allowed me to focus on crowd control and trying to remember the three chords each song has with some decent results. For most of that time I have been using a Scienceguy built unit, but I have never been happy about its build quality and worried about the day when the unit finally bites the dust. Recently I saw a new product from Brooklyn based tinkerer XIWI Electronics which looked pretty robust and I figured what the hell, and ordered a unit from their online shop. The unit itself is solidly built. It has sleek looks and the detachable link cable and power supply are handy in connecting to my various Game Boy units. One thing I noticed is that some modded Game Boys are no longer able to power the Scienceguy via the link cable, so having external power is something I will have to research to see if it has any impact on solving the issue. The unit is powered using my Voodoo Labs pedal power unit that I use to power my Nord Micro Modular, my Shruthi-1, and various other gear with no complaints. The push button looks gorgeous and feels great, but in operation it is a little finicky and may require double presses to select the various modes. In actual operation, it works like pretty much every other Arduinoboy. Some users have reported problems in getting their Arduinoboy to send midi properly, so here are my settings via the maxpat editor found on the Arduinoboy website: A quick note: - I use four channels of midi. 1,2,4 are controlling synths so they are just assigned one CC, CC1 for modulation. The whole range of the CC is scaled across the usable range of the CC message. The noise channel is mapped to channel 3 which controls all my various effects boxes. Here I use various CC messages to toggle on and off various effect settings for my guitars and vocals. This is a very robust unit high value unit that simply works as advertised. The unit is sturdy and reliable in limited testing and is a good product for those who are looking for getting into LSDJ syncing and external midi control. If anyone has questions please post them in the comments.