Midifighter assembly pictures

I was sooo happy yesterday when after months of drooling over the arcade button-based midi controller, the Midifighter, my very own arrived in the mail! These are produced in very limited quantities and had been out of stock for months. Making matters even sweeter was the fact that I won this one in a DJ Tech Tools contest.

One of the cool things about the Midifighter is the ability to customize your own. This isn't a mass produced controller that everyone has. You choose the color of your Sanwa arcade buttons, and you can spraypaint the arcylic faceplate. The result is a whole bunch of different looking Midifighters.

There is a fair degree of assembly required, so I thought I'd walk you through it.

These are all the items that arrived in the box. The circuit board, two acrylic plates, screws and stuff, arcade buttons, a super high quality DJTT usb cable, four stickers, and a letter with assembly instructions printed on the back.

First step is to peel the plastic off the bottom acrylic plate.



Then remove the circuit board from the anti-static bag. This circuit board features hand soldered connections, so that you can just snap in the arcade buttons with no soldering required.



The next step was to peel off the protective paper from the second acrylic plate.



Then I had to insert these plastic rods into the plate. These will feed light from LEDs on the circuit board to the top surface of the Midifighter.



After that, you want to attach these little rubber grommet things to secure the tiny plastic rods in place.



Next I secured the bottom acrylic plate to the circuit board using screws and little metal spacer things. Then I screwed in those larger spacers on top.



These Sanwa arcade buttons are super high quality and made in Japan. Look for the Sanwa on the bottom of your arcade buttons to make sure they're awesome.



Inserting these buttons was a little scary for me. I was afraid of snapping the connections. They do require a little extra push (but not too forceful) just to get them to snap into place.

And voila! My new Midifighter! I chose colors that roughly match the excellent Traktor mapping developed by DJ Tech Tools. If you're interested in what the hell that is, here's a video explaining it. I opted not to spraypaint the acrylic plate because I like the clear look. If I change my mind, I can always remove it and paint it.



Once I plugged in this thing, I was elated to realize this is an extremely rare Midifighter with red LEDs! Usually they are blue.



I flipped it over, and realized for the first time that mine was one of only 100 with red LEDs. Number 89 to be exact.

Soon I'll be posting a video of this thing in use! Thanks again for the free Midifighter DJ Tech Tools!