After a month and a half of exhaustion on various smallish jobs, I arrived home to find a shiny new Ableton Push 2 controller waiting for me.
There's a huge amount of potential in this device, although my thoughts are probably not in the area of it's manufacturer's intended use! I see it as a high-quality RGB grid controller and a set of re-purposable function buttons, with the massive bonus of a totally customisable built-in LED display, which runs at desktop display refresh rate.
In order to start getting some of my plans for integration with various software going, my first order of business was the prove that I could output my own video to the display. This proved nicely easy thanks to Ableton's API documents and libusb, and after a few hours of effort I have a pretty simple Max object which happily streams Jitter matrices at 60 Hz over USB.
In the interests of sharing, I've released this external on Github, and you can also download it from my max externals page. I'd like to expand the scope of the external in future to include parsing for all the button LEDs (from their raw MIDI note/controller values) and also full LED control. If you'd like to help out, head over to Github and send me a pull request.