Novation Zero SLmk2 mod?

[BIT_IFFY]

Hi. I'm sitting at my desk messing about with Reason and playing with the automap mappings and Thor in general. Iv been tinkling away at my keyboard making some nice grungey sounds and turned to my Zero and tried tapping the so called 'drum pads'. Which as I'm sure everyone reading this, they're 8 ponies just sat there doing nothing. But my reason for posting isn't to whine about em, we all know it, but we use the Zero coz of all those knobs n sliders.


Anyway, it suddenly occured to me that my warranty had run out long ago and I'm now free to pull it apart without warranty voidance repercussions. And that it would be great to have 8 pots or encoders in place of the useless pads there now.
How possible is it to pull out the pads and replace them with pots or encoders? Will the existing software read the data from new pots/enc as much the same data as from the pads? From the looks of the automap GUI i can assign knob type parameters to them, such as Thors rotaries, Osc Tune etc.


I haven't pulled my Zero apart yet to check whats what, but I do have a dead RemoteLE with 8 pots on it that my be useful. Ooohhh, just another thought, is there anywhere on the Zero's pcbs to fit the XY pad and/or pitch/mod stick? It would have to be separate and external, but could it be wired in and use some sort of connector block to connect them together?


Has anyone else attempted any of this? If so, how did you go about it and what problems did you have? Are there issues with connecting pots to the connections that the pad sensors feed into? Are there firmware issues?
Im asking these questions before I try pulling it apart as I've never modified or built anything electrical before (mechanical systems im fine with, just not electrics and electronics) and dont want to pointlessly break it just yet.


Any advice in this regard will be greatly appreciated

Cheers peeps, IFFY