Late in 2010, I began looking at the current state of protocol communication in the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) field. Many in the NIME community are experts at finding creative and expressive uses of new sensing technology. This shared knowledge coupled with a growing emphasis in open-source and open-hardware enables relatively inexperienced artists to build expressive interfaces. The general feeling in the Interface Design class at CalArts was that middleware (serial to OSC/MIDI software) kept holding artists hostage to communication difficulties. I took on this challenge to develop HIDUINO, a specialized firmware for Arduinos that permits arbitrary sensor data to be sent over standard, driverless USB protocols.

The HIDUINO project aims to provide ready-to-download firmwares, documentation, and example code for turning a new Arduino UNO or Mega2560 into a class-compliant, driverless MIDI/HID device. These firmwares are directly based off of the LUFA framework by Dean Camera, a generic USB/HID library for Atmel’s line of ATmega USB-compatible microcontrollers.

HIDUINO was presented at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference on May 31st, 2011 at the University of Oslo. The video to the side is a recording of the presentation. Notable mentions of HIDUINO include Hackaday, Arduino, and Adafruit. Below are several NIMES and robotic instruments by students that are powered by HIDUINO; over fifty interfaces, instruments, and installations have been documented using HIDIUNO since early 2011.