Hi guys - excited about Grid.
Any future plans for being able to send OSC? I didn’t see mention on the site or in the docs.
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What would you control with OSC, in what kind of setting?
We control lighting (Chromatik / LX Studio) and lasers (Pangolin) in a live performance setting.
The Akai APC40 mkii is the default surface for both, but is now officially end of life without clear intent for a mk3 successor (it’s likely the APC64 - a device with touch faders 
and not a single rotary knob). With Monome having unreliable product availability and Roli reshuffling the lineup, I’m appreciative of what Intech is doing.
I appreciate the flexibility of OSC addresses and native support for >7bit values (plus floats and text values). We also use OSC as a coordination layer between Pioneer DJ gear and the lighting systems.
I want to add another use case: Hardware mixer control. There are these headless, stage box format mixers from all major audio brands which are supposed to be controlled with a tablet or PC. This might be feasible and even handy for FoH applications. But as a live musician on stage I consider touch screens bad because it requires more visual control, has no haptic feedback and can be unreliable with dirt, sweat or just software glitches involved.
Many of these mixers are working with OSC under the hood. My dream would be that I don’t have to rely on a screen for all major controls I need. However, I see a bigger impediment with the Grid controllers. OSC is send via Ethernet but the controllers only have USB-C. Even if the controllers could host an Ethernet adapter, there’s still a power supply required and things are getting hacky.
Alternatively, there could be a Knot 2.0 that also has an Ethernet port and can be programmed to either do the encapsulation or translate MIDI to OSC (and vice-versa) by user-defined rules. The latter would also make it more interesting as a stand-alone product.
Ah, fellow lighting guy 
Didn’t knew that LX Studio evolved into something more stand-alone, looks exiting!
Whaaat? I better get a few more of those now…
TBH I have concerns with using Grid modules for lighting control because my approach is less chases and more live performance 
Yeah, no chases here either. We use MF Twisters for shader parameter control, with TouchOSC above them for labeling. It’s an art car with 128K individually controlled LEDs. Here’s our current control desk:
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Thanks for the info guys.
It’s a story worth investigating for sure.
Two things are on my mind:
- Should this be hardware native feature?
- Should it work when Grid Editor runs in the background?
As far as I can tell, OSC requires some kind of server, where UDP messages are being sent. Making such thing is relatively easy in the Grid Editor, so if Editor can run in the background, translating Grid’s messages to OSC (utilising Grid’s in-depth lua configuration capabilities), then this story can be made.
If the hardware itself should work as an OSC controller standalone… Well we would need to tweak the firmware for that, so Grid would get an IP address utilising some sort of USB ethernet protocol. This area would require more investment from us - or the need of community support from programmers capable of working on embedded systems.
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To be honest, a software solution is not very useful since MIDI to OSC is already possible with other software and it would still require a host PC. IMHO another software bridge wouldn’t be worth the effort.
The market gap is hardware controllers which are capable to speak OSC without a host PC. There are only few products available which can actually speak ethernet and they’re mostly bulky, very expensive and supposed to be used with certain hosts for pro audio/lighting applications.
But fact is that the Grid modules don’t have an Ethernet port. OSC over USB isn’t that useful either because I can’t see how this can be translated to Ethernet without a PC. Could you please elaborate on what you think about a possible hardware solution like the Knot or some kind of adapter?
There are two possible solutions, both requiring decent amount of firmware development effort.
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Grid firmware could support USB host mode and a USB-C Ethernet adapter could be connected directly. This is a clean solution but we still need to somehow power Grid. Maybe from another module that has USB power connected.
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Knot style device that hosts grid modules (or arbitrary MIDI controllers) and converts messages to OSC (ethernet).
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It sounds not-so-clean to me because power delivery would require either two modules, an adapter with PD (if the Grid can handle that) or some weird cable. 
But the Knob 2.0 could be the “Ethernet adapter” in this case.
AFAIK there’s no such product on the market so I see a big opportunity to attract customers who would not buy a Grid controller in the first place. I mean look at this.
There’s already a setup in place and we also have to admit that it couldn’t be fully replicated with the Grid controllers because they don’t offer the same features and haptics. I also love my Grid modules too much to smash the buttons as much and hard as I do with the APC 40 or the MIDI Fighter Spectra.
But in this case Intech Studio could easily sell me a few Knot 2.0 which I can easily interlink with an Ethernet switch and whatever server application(s) I want to control
The Grid editor software already has an interface which seems suitable to configure the mappings of the Knot.
I don’t really see the point of a background aplication that does this on the computer, as there are already 3rd party apps doing midi to osc.
However some sort of Usb to ethernet converter for controlling Motu Interfaces or Behringer Xseries mixer would be a dream its a bit of a niche aplication though.
Wanted to agree with the folks saying there’s already Midi->OSC apps with one condition: I’m really interested in pots with >7 bits of resolution for my applications, so as long as that bridge allowed access to the (in practical use) 10 bits of useful resolution via a two-channel14-bit MIDI → OSC int or float, that’d be best.