Project: VCV Rack-in-a-box

For as long as I’ve been using VCV Rack (pretty much from the day it went to public beta) I’ve fantasised about a small self-contained box. Many attempts were made over the years, usually involving a Raspberry Pi… but they just lacked the grunt (and audio IO) to be able to handle my typical patches and plethora of MIDI controllers which generally would bring my tired old i7 MacBook Pro to it’s knees.

Plus it was always a pain finding somewhere to PUT the damn MacBook or monitors to incorporate VCV into my alcove-fitting-studio.

Then, miraculously, over the past 24 months the stars began to align. Three things happened.

UPGRADE TIME! (Something I’d partially been holding off as to do so meant retiring the firewire stack of MOTU interfaces)

HOW COULD I NOT? All that was missing was a set of rails and a box… so last week I set to work. In dreamland, 1mm powder-coated black sheet steel folded into a 66mm deep 84HP skiff would’ve been perfect, but B&Q don’t sell that and I couldn’t find anything online that’d fit the bill. So I went with Option B – 9mm hardwood ply.

Turns out, I can fit a Behringer CP1A power supply, ES9, the screen, a MacMini, and a USB-C hub (with 1Tb SSD) in 84HP of space… with enough room left over for USB headers (and eventually TRS MIDI I/O)

To mount everything up I had to chop the rails… 20HP to mount the ED9 and CP1A, and the rest set back 16mm to mount the screen onto (via Meccano strips vertically between the rails to the VESA mounting points on the rear of the screen) so that it sat flush with the Eurorack modules.

Behringer’s rails from it’s rack mount kit aren’t ideal for this. I should really have gone to Synthracks on Etsy as they have rails perfect for attaching top and bottom, rather than via the ends… but I’m impatient. So I ended up drilling through the screen’s rails to bolt them to the top and bottom of the box.

For this first prototype I went deep – it’s 110mm deep at the moment as I was originally going to mount the USB-C hub sideways so that I could have it’s USB2/3 ports at the front alongside the screen, and it’s USB-C and HDMI ports exposed at the rear. That didn’t quite work as planned, so realistically the whole box could now be 66-86mm deep (internally) as originally intended… but for this first prototype it’ll do.

As it stands, mounting screen onto rails means the thinnest it can currently be is 16mm (screen) + depth of rail + 50mm (M4 MacMini)… somewhere around 86mm. But do away with attaching the screen to rails and find a better way to mount it gets it back down 66mm. MacMini + Screen depth = plenty to accommodate the ES9.

That’ll be the next revision.

For those curious about control…

An Adafruit Neotrellis M4 (an 8×4 grid controller, as featured elsewhere on this ‘ere site) sends MIDI Notes to 2 instances of Stoermelder’s GoTo module, which scrolls around a 20-slot grid of 60-ish HP panes anchored by label panels, with zoom set so a rack height = screen height. That covers navigating around a patch if needed. Knobs etc are all physically MIDI-mapped out to my BCR2000 and BCF2000.

And if I actually need to do any major modifications, I have the usual magic keyboard / mouse / trackpad to connect to it wirelessly.

So, without further a-do… my first attempt at a self-contained M4-powered VCV Rack-in-a-Box with full Eurorack CV I/O (and a firewire socket.. for now – I still use an 828MkII for line-level audio inputs alongside the ES9 for Eurorack-level, but next release of MacOS will kill firewire once and for all)

Added bonus… OF COURSE I installed Hyperion and mapped the screen to WLED over WiFi …and there’s the handy perk of the MacMini’s built-in speaker for use on-the-fly:

And this all puts me in the perfect position to start swapping out all that semi-modular / l’il box kit for a proper euro rack case and modules. Into the money-pit I go…!