From one board to 1.0.
Eight months of TriMixxx, one phase per post, oldest first. They were written in October 2026, looking back over the repository's history; each is dated by when its phase ended.
- Part 1 · Feb – Mar 2026
One board to rule them all
TriMixxx began as a single 250 mm board carrying a Compute Module 5, a DAC, USB-C power and a MIDI controller. It was fully routed, and never built.
- Part 2 · Apr – Jun 2026
Measure twice, etch four times
A real CDJ taken apart and measured photo by photo, a chassis drawn around it, a 3D printer, boards etched at home with a laser, and the first controller board of its own.
- Part 3 · Jul 2026
A deck is a network
Instead of one board that does everything, an ESP32-S3 in the middle and rings of tiny RISC-V boards for the pads, passing a single frame round at 500 kbaud. With white LEDs, a dying pin and a baud rate off by two along the way.
- Part 4 · Jul 2026
Mixxx on a Pi, with nothing but MIDI
A Raspberry Pi that boots into Mixxx, sees the deck as an ordinary MIDI controller, mounts DJ sticks read-only, and runs a fork with a skin made for a booth. And an audio buffer chosen against the measurement.
- Part 5 · 29 – 31 Jul 2026
Talking to CDJs
Two CDJ-2000NXS players, a Mac bridging their network, and one long evening of captures. By its end a real CDJ was browsing, loading and playing music served by TriMixxx. 51 findings, and a protocol nobody had implemented from the serving side.
- Part 6 · 1 Aug 2026
The deck plays DOOM
Hold PLAY while the deck boots and it becomes a DOOM cabinet, the jog wheel turning and the pads picking weapons. Not a fork of the game, but a launch manager that reads the deck's own buttons at boot, and a virtual keyboard made of MIDI.
- Part 7 · 2 – 4 Aug 2026
A browser for a thumb
Mixxx's library is built for a mouse. The deck got a CDJ-style browser driven by one encoder, tracks that start playing before they have arrived, and its first tempo and phase sync with a live CDJ.
- Part 8 · 11 – 14 Aug 2026
Sends and returns
For a few weeks the deck doubled as an effects unit on an Allen & Heath Xone:92's aux send, returning wet signal only. It worked, it taught a lot about mixers and manuals, and in October it was taken out again.
- Part 9 · Sep – Oct 2026
Two decks
A second chassis drawn around a 10.1-inch screen, a second deck built on 1 October, an eighth pad nobody expected, an accent colour each, a hotspot of its own, and a splash on screen twelve seconds sooner.
- Part 10 · 4 Oct 2026
A night at Technobase
On 4 October 2026 the second deck played its first gig, at Technobase, in a secret underground location. It read every stick it was given, froze on the big ones, and taught the next release what a deck in a booth really needs.
- Part 11 · 7 – 9 Oct 2026
Updates that roll back
A deck in a booth can't be reflashed between two tracks. So TriMixxx releases go into a second slot on the card, start as a one-shot trial, and are kept only if the deck can still take the next one. Designed, built and fault-tested in two days.
- Part 12 · 4 – 13 Oct 2026
Decks that don't exist
A whole TriMixxx deck running on a Mac from its real SD card, up in three seconds, beside emulated CDJ-2000NXS players booting Pioneer's own firmware. How a booth fits on a laptop, and what it changed about testing.
- Part 13 · 15 Oct 2026
TriMixxx 1.0
The first release numbered like one. A History of everything played on the link, Record set, KEY SYNC with a list of keys, plain sticks shared with CDJs both ways, and two fixes the same day, one of them for a deck that offered its own operating system as a USB stick.
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