Music productivity on the AKAI S900 could be greatly improved by having a better display available and also units with a faulty LCD could benefit from a CV output MOD.
I've used an Arduino Leonardo to develop this mod because Arduino already had ready-to-go CV output options available therefore most of the work was about writing a piece of code to decode signals from the AKAI S900 to the LCD display. These ones are digital data, so most of the stuff is a bounce of 1s and 0s which need to be translated into pixels. As soon as the current buffer changes the old one is shifted up on the screen and the new one displayed; this "memory" feature was quite easy to do.
After some days of testing I was finally able to get something on screen and I'm super excited! However as it's possible to see from the picture, the unit locks as soon as some floppy command is issued. This is quite a Mistery to me, I assumed the display was completely separated from the audio hardware. My guess is that the LCD sends back some sort of feedback to the OS which in turn is not liking what the Arduino is sending (acually, nothing...). At this point I need to figure out how to fix this problem before considering to release even a Beta of the MOD to the public and I hope to get some help from outside.
