Is it possible to use UNO R4 Minima to build a USB MIDI controller?

Official Hardware UNO Family UNO R4 Minima
1

Hello.

I'm new to Arduino and purchased UNO Minima R4 for prototyping a MIDI controller working through USB. I installed the library MIDI-USB and USB-MIDI but it seems the MIDI-USB library is not compatible with the Minima R4 architecture. I since learned that best option for MIDI USB controllers has been an Arduino with ATmega32u4 architecture.

Anyone has experience in getting R4 to work as a Midi USB controller? I have tried to find a solution and heard rumors that maybe some library is upcoming at some point. Of course it's possible to modify existing libraries or build a solution without a library, but I'm not sure if I am up to the task as a beginner developer. In principle it seems though that the UNO R4 has all the capabilities to work as a USB controller - I have tested to use a potentiometer as a "mouse" and it seems to work like a charm.

Thinking should I just give up at this point and get eg. Arduino Leonardo to keep working with my project and in the meantime wait for library updates on R4.

Thanks.

2

Well you can already use the R4 Minima for MIDI providing you can run the "hairless" app on your computer.
This app converts serial into MIDI on your computer.

It no longer runs on Macs newer than macOS Mojave 10.14.6, but I still runs under Windows and Linux I believe. Then the MIDI-Library will work.

Note the serial port in hairless must be reconnected from the drop down menu after each upload of code to the Uno R4. just take the basic IO example and add
`Serial.begin(115200); // HAIRLESS DEFAULT SPEED'
as the last thing in the setup function.

In theory it should be simple enough to adapt that by changing the USB descriptors. But I haven't looked into that yet.

3

Thanks! Unfortunately I have MacOS newer than Mojave - so using Hairless seems not to be a solution with my Mac. I think I'll go with Leonardo for now (hate to do this because of all the usb cables and adapters I have to get to use it with USB-C port) and try to find a solution to work with R4 later.

I probably try at some point to build a solution for R4 if someone doesn't do it first - a good idea to adapt mouse HID to work with midi.

4

I have been trying to do just that but I am having no success at all.
That includes trying to use the Mouse and Keyboard libraries and also the USB MIDI library. It simply will not work with any variations that each of these approaches uses. So I guess there is a lot more to doing this than I thought.