Coffeepal,
Thanks for the suggestions and kind words about the Altura.
I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that anyone would use the Altura the way you are using it, by waving it around. I can understand that it is too heavy now with the metal case for that type of use. I think we might still have some acrylic case parts for the MkII, if you are interested in building an acrylic case for it. It would be much lighter than metal, but it may not be as light as cardboard.
Adding a sustain pedal would be a pretty intensive mod to the Altura, mostly because I believe all the microcontroller pins are currently being used for other things. Besides that, it would take re-designing the chassis and PCB to add an extra jack for the footswitch. But that’s maybe something we can try if we do another version of this product later. Thank you for the suggestion.
To answer your question about turning off each sensor…it is possible to put a switch on the power rail of each sensor. That would give you the ability to turn each sensor on and off as you’d like. On the 4-wire cable going to each sensor, pin 1 on the PCB (the square pad) is connected to the 5V power rail. If you add a series switch on that wire, I think that should work. You may need to add a small capacitor to ground on the sensor side of the switch, depending on how the sensors respond to being instantly turned off. But you can experiment to see if you need it.
Thanks again for your suggestions and comments.
Take care.
-Brach