Serial communication questions (attiny and atmega8) - Standalone midi controller

Projects General Guidance
1

I'm building a simple midi controller to be built as standalone.

The idea is to build it on a pcb, with an Atmel chip with arduino bootloader, and all that (like a boarduino), but have yet to decide which one to use. I have successfully programmed an Attiny2313, Attiny85 and Atmega8 with the same method, so all that remains is to decide on one of them... Code is done and tested on Arduino Uno (actually only consists on reading some input buttons and translating into midi messages, so all instructions are available on the "lower" chips), but I have some questions I've been having some trouble finding answers before I start building it...

Question 1: Is it possible to have serial output (for midi flow) with an Attiny85?
I know it's doable with the Attiny2313 and Atmega8, as they have serial comm built-in, but was wondering if there is a smaller chip that would work (attiny 85 is only 8 "legs", against 20 on both others...), as I'm trying to build it as small as possible.

Question 2: Is it possible to operate at 31250 baudrate (midi) with the internal 8Mhz clock, or would I absolutely need an external 16Mhz xtal?

Thanks in advance.

2

Question 1: Is it possible to have serial output (for midi flow) with an Attiny85?

The ATTiny85 can use NewSoftSerial/SoftwareSerial to do serial communication.

Question 2: Is it possible to operate at 31250 baudrate (midi) with the internal 8Mhz clock, or would I absolutely need an external 16Mhz xtal?

Yes. The 3.3V Arduinos operate at 8MHz with no serial communication issues at any speed.

3

Great!
I'll give it a try, then.

Thank you.

4

i'm working on a similar project myself right now
could you tel me which problems you had to solve and how you did solve them