Hey Taran here is a suggestion for you next video "How to turn your Ipad Pro into a Wireless Macro 'Keyboard' (or any tablet)"

[Dan Costa]

Hi for whoever reads this, I just want to share a bunch of stuff I've been collecting recently that as of right now enabled me to turn my Ipad Pro into a full wireless macro "keyboard".

 

Quick summary: (very quick because I don't want to lose the productivity freaks that may be interested in this) 

I was currently running variations of Taran's AHK scripts on Icue but I run out of keys...Unable to get my hands on HASU I did the next obvious thing, "lets give meaning to the 'PRO' word on the Ipad tittle" (in reality it actually works in any tablet). For context, I do 2D animation compositing work Inside After Affects and I also supervise a team of two other compositors (and the film I'm currently working has 1300 shots), every piece of automation is desperately needed. So, to get lots of extra "hotkeys" what I did was to use this OSC app to send MIDI signals to the computer so that AHK could map them and do his work(or my work) for each signal.

 

Example in action:

(I didn't had time to make an specific layout to use in After Efects so I was using this keyboard for testing, when I do it I will share it) 

 

For those who haven't seen Taran series on Macro keyboards I recommend doing so because this is extremely specific stuff.

 

Now to the actual stuff:

• Get the TouchOSC App that's been around since 2007 ( works on Andorid or iOS) - Why not any other free OSC/MIDI app? Because Touch OSC has this layout editor that lets you decide which MIDI value/note to be passed on key-press, and if you don't want to get into MIDI you can setup normal Keys and use it with A-Z, 0-9, F keys for macro... Not only that but the desktop editor let you customize the layout of the buttons to your heart's desire. 

TouchOSC Layout editor (you only have to pay for the iOS/Android app the rest is free). The MIDI signal is interpreted as Notes because MIDI stands for Music Instrument Digital Interface, so the "hotkeys" are represented and mapped as "Music Notes"

• Download the free TouchOSC Bridge and TouchOSC Editor - (And then you can install them, its pretty straight forward) ( with the editor you can create the layouts and assign values to the touch keys)
• Go to Github and download this custom made MIDI Library for AHK https://github.com/micahstubbs/midi4ahk - ( This guy, made an awesome job to compile all the work people did in this thread)
• Inside the main folder you will see a bunch of scripts, most of them for testing purpose.

• Open "MidiInWMTest.ahk" and press a keys on the tablet to see the signal passed to AHK.  - ( And if you want to get funky, configure a key on the OSC Editor to return any note from 48 to 55 and run "Midi_in_lib_test.ahk")
• The "midi_keymap_template.ahk" already comes loaded with the basic "hotkeys" so you can get right into it (it has several setups for some notes, I believe you can do notes up to 127 + multiple channels, in another file "wheel_vis_sample.ahk "you can learn to capture Control Changes instead of Notes. MIDI has lots of output signals to map).

 

That's it... It is actually pretty simple stuff, the work was already there, all I did was to assign new use to it. If you liked it check out the thread I mention in the AHK forum, this user orbik did an awesome job on a dll to create this MIDI library for AHK. And last but not least all started when I saw a guy doing this TouchOSC layout to control his After Effect. (next step is to get him to share his layout lol) 

 

PS: I don't know if Taran will ever get to read this, but if he does, Taran, you are my HERO! You have saved me probably hundreds of hours and dollars from your macro endeavors!