Maschine MK3 "clone"

[polli]

Hi! First of all, this is my first electronics project ever. Just pretend this was posted in the Beginners section. I just printed "Designing Analog Chips", free book, which apparently should be good to learn electronics in general - I'm just going to look up stuff I don't understand anyway - and right now my electronics knowledge is just ohm's law :D

Here's the plan. I'm going to make a "clone" of this thing: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/maschine/production-systems/maschine/

I'm using clone loosely here:

• I'm not going to make an audio interface, as I just need a midi controller.
• I think it has two displays, but I already have a cheap hdmi display meant for a raspberry pi, so I'm going to use a single one.
• It has a bunch of buttons not dedicated to midi, and I think I'm going to have very few of those, and use sort of a "Fn" button that combines with midi buttons.
  
• It has 16 main buttons, I think I want 64.
• It's made of cool metal stuff, and I'm going to use wood.
• It's actually well made, and mine is going to be terrible :P

I'm going to use this thread to document my progress and to ask for advice. This is going to be a long project, both because I will use it to learn electronics, and because I wouldn't be able to afford every component at once.

Having only programmed on processors with C/C++/Python and so on, I've always wanted to try an FPGA. I'm not sure I will be able to design a PCB for it, so I might have to buy a dev kit, but then i'm not sure I'd have enough IO. We'll see.

That's it for now!