OK, I am playing around now. I've thought of a new MIDI gizmo to add in - a cross between a real-time sampler, sequencer and arpeggiator. I am also thinking it will be a MIDI master clock as well. I am using one of my boards from the Hakked! soldering iron, with ATMega328 processor and the flourescent display interface. I added a small daughter board to accept a MIDI interface (the five pin DIN style, not a USB one) and to wire the rotary encoder to.

Works so far ..

.. now off to write some code to update internal variables based on the encoder and the VFD display, and then I'll borrow some code from very clever people on t'Internet to make it all work.