Googling around, others wanted to know how to control the pad illumination and OLED and how to map it. Fair enough, warning heeded, don’t buy a Fire if you intend to use it with something else. Akai’s official response to any MIDI implementation inquiry is that they have no interest in documenting the protocol because the Fire is a dedicated controller intended for use with FL Studio. Unlit Fireīefore I purchased the Fire I knew that its MIDI implementation was totally undocumented. Maybe you can unlock some more features?Īnyway, skim through and take what you want from these articles if you’re you’re only interested in how to control the Akai Fire’s pad matrix and button LEDs, or to write something to the OLED display. The final part has some bonus material on the Fire that I’ve not seen anywhere else. The most challenging part, that of bit-addressing the OLED.Putting color on the buttons and pad matrix.Basic mapping of button, pad, and rotary inputs.What you’re going to readīecause this is so long, I’ve split it into a series of three postings:

If you want to try this yourself, in Part 3 there is a Zip file with an assorted collection of animations over the pad matrix, buttons, and OLED. Pads, buttons, and OLED all lit up, written to, and under embedded control! Here’s what the article will enable you to do with your embedded software, or any other software that is capable of sending MIDI messages: This is my first contribution to the USB product, a very small contribution, and one that I intend to use a lot! This enables your embedded device to interact with all the MIDI instruments and control surfaces you can imagine, a huge array of equipment. Recently, SEGGER introduced the emUSB-Host MIDI class driver. But keep the faith, it is related to embedded systems, just a slightly different slant. This post is a departure from what I usually write about. I describe the analysis process, the educated guesses I made, the tools I used, and how I came to a usable specification for the Fire’s MIDI implementation. This article documents the journey I took to analyze and decipher MIDI control messages understoood by a MIDI control surface: the the most delightful Akai Fire.

Akai fire midi controller