Add midi in/out/thru and channel select?

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    • #1831
      spurioussquare
      Participant

      I am still waiting on the post to deliver my arduino pro nanos but I was wondering the utility in adding TRS MIDI in/out/thru and channel selectors with something like the Panasonic EVQV9C00116E 16 detent rotary encoder or four bits of toggle switches?

      my thinking is that this would allow the components to be daisy chained without usb and would allow for more utility with older midi devices.

      has this been explored? Is it worth exploring? If there is no reason not to I was thinking I’d order some TRS jacks and patch cables and channel select switches and see if I can get it working in hardware and in the code

      I’m also tooling around with the idea of using 5pin miniDIN  or PS/2 6 pin (ive seen more ps/2 to 5 pin DIN adapters in my quick searches) so that pins 1 and 5 could be used for 5VDC phantom power so that usb wouldn’t be needed at all but I’d have to have think more about how to safely guarantee I wasn’t frying any equipment that potentially had pins 1 and 5 hooked up internally.

      Thoughts?

       

    • #1832
      Johan von Konow
      Keymaster

      Hi

       

      I considered using 3.5mm connectors for serial midi in the beginning, but decided to use USB since it didn’t require external connectors and components, used I/Os or caused (minor) delays if using midi thru. It is possible to use one hardware serial port and one software serial port.

      If you use usb to provide power, it’s a lot of extra wires. In theory you can also skip optical isolation and provide power over the fourth 3.5mm connector, but then you have to avoid connecting it to other TRS midi devices without a buffer.

      Personally, I think it is better to use a MIDI bridge to connect it to other devices. (It is rather easy to build one using a microcontroller that supports USB host mode.)

    • #1914
      Wapata
      Participant

      Hi,

      Wait… you can make a device that accept like 6 USB instruments and output a physical Midi port ?

      … And power the 6 USB instruments in the same time

    • #1935
      Johan von Konow
      Keymaster

      I was more thinking about one USB host and several serial MIDI interfaces…

      Multiple USB hosts might be possible with a USB hub, but I have not tested and would probably use a raspi instead (overkill, but easy to develop)

      /j

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