Surface-Control Midi on nano 33 BLE Windows 10

Hello Forum,

I'm trying to use the Arduino nano 33 BLE with the midi-library Surface-Control: GitHub - tttapa/Control-Surface: Arduino library for creating MIDI controllers and other MIDI devices.

As far as I understood, in order to compile for the nano 33 BLE I need mbed OS, which I installed:

I did that but when I try to compile and upload I first get the following message

WARNING: library Control-Surface-1.2.0 claims to run on avr, sam, samd, teensy, esp32, esp8266, megaavr architecture(s) and may be incompatible with your current board which runs on mbed_nano architecture(s).

which I find very confusing as the documentation page clearly states that Surface-Control supports the nano 33 BLE:

GitHub - tttapa/Control-Surface: Arduino library for creating MIDI controllers and other MIDI devices.

When I try to flash the same code on my Arduino Pro Micro it works flawlessly and connects to FL Studio without problems.

@PieterP I saw that someone had a similiar issue in the following post, but the info seems to be outdated, as I couldn't find those lines in the current master release of Surface-Control.

forum.arduino.cc/t/arduino-nano-33-ble-usbmidi-device/696783

On another note, I saw that BLE is only supported on ESP32 as of now. Will the nano 33 BLE support bluetooth in the near future?
On my Pro Micro the setup was instant, much better than other midi libraries which required a lot of hassle to do something very simple.

Thank you very much for all the work! :slight_smile:

Kind regards

Tiziano

Version 1.2.0 does not support the Arduino Nano 33 BLE, you'll have to use the master branch.

as the documentation page clearly states that Surface-Control supports the nano 33 BLE

The page you linked to is the README of the master branch, not for version 1.2.0 (which is here: https://github.com/tttapa/Control-Surface/tree/1.2.0#supported-boards).

The lines in question are in the Arduino Core, not in Control Surface.

If you download the master version I pushed just now (656ae50a04078ebcdbaafccd6189668ef73be914), you shouldn't need to patch it anymore.

Unfortunately not, I just don't have the time right now.

1 Like

The nRF52840 on the Arduino Nano 33 BLE is a BLE only device and does not support Bluetooth Classic. Supporting BLE only allows a lower power and lower cost chip design. This might not make a difference to Arduino user like you and me but will make a difference for customers that buy many millions of units.

Thank you for the responses, I have been experimenting quite a bit the past few days, turns out windows caused some of the issues I had. After many updates it started working better, but inconsistently. I switched to the ESP32 but I am still experiencing inconsistent BLE connectivity.
It is perfectly recognized by Midiberry and also as a native MIDI-BLE device which is good, but connection is unstable and sometimes the code crashes the DAW.

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.