I have been working on making my own version of the auduino. It sounds really cool! I made my own PCB using a laser printer and ferric chloride. The next step is to add MIDI support and an LCD screen, this way I can assign the pots to different functions E.G. different wave types. If anyone has experience with reading keynotes from a midi keyboard, please help me out.
Heres some pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/HELLOwhereiseveryone/SynthisizerProject?feat=directlink
Nigel
HI there Nigel.
I've actually just made a midi-keyboard reader.
I bought a keyboard from Accessories English navigate down to synthesizer keyboard 25TP/7, 25 keys / 2 octaves, without after touch.
That schematic .gif really helped. (though I one little bug left)
If you are interested give me a holler and I'l put up what I've done to read it.
That would be great! Im not sure of how to interface it to a midi cable, if you could post how you did it that would be awesome!
Thanks a lot
Nigel
How do you mean, interface to a midi cable?
I read the key's with multiplexing the in and outs and then I've just hooked it up to a 5 pin din where I send the midi messages.
Well Im sorta confused, can you just post how you interfaced it so I have a refference point to work from?
Thanks a lot
Nigel
ok, to read the midi.keyboard I've made a 595 IC out circuit (just like the one decribed in the playground) then I read the 8 ins directly on 8 pins on the arduino. There I have some logic to calculate velocity and such. and then I send midi messages much like the spooky arduino does.
http://todbot.com/blog/2006/10/29/spooky-arduino-projects-4-and-musical-arduino/
that's all
I'll post all my code and schematics on the internets as soon as I'm done!
The actual MIDI interface is usually done with a UART, an optocoupler and a slightly unusual baud rate. I think it's 1MHz divided by 16, which is easy to do in hardware. The optocoupler (or optoisolator) is used to prevent grounding problems between instruments.