Message
Re: Is this possible with BCL and BCR2000
2015-12-23 by sghookings@...
Merry Chrimbo and all that stuff
I have been using an Arduino Mega 1280 for some years to have kinky man-in-the-middle fun between BCR and (initially) Miniak. Ultimate I was using it to filter out the FE/FF real time heartbeats, to zone and layer so that a simply MIDI keyboard can control different channels etc, as an ARP unit (with the up/down, random, up/down -- infact I implemented same as EMU Emulator II based on their manual) and a primitive sequencer.
Why Arduino?
1] dirt cheap
2] the MEGA [[BE VERY CARFEFUL WHICH ONE YOU BUY - THESE CH340G ones are crap ... I found I needed the 1280 to bootstrap the 2560s via Nick Gammon's excellent bootloaders and you get one chance to program before you do the same thing again!!]] anyhow the MEGA has 4 UARTs of which 3 are usable. Why not all 4? The first is shared with other comms and can mess up the bootloaded.
This allows one to read data in, two to read data in, implement a midi merge and the third to send out the merged (and transformed) values.
Downside is one interrupt at a time, and only 16MHz 128/256k Harvard architecture so a few funny tricks to stop silent stack overflow -- but since I started with ZX81 1K Z80a these things are more than fast enough in plain C.
RPi2
I recently got one of these to try to get my 10 year old daughter interested in programming - it has Minecraft. So far I have failed. However, it is possible to do midi with these things but only one UART. Still, 900MHz per core means you could do quite a lot of stuff in the 324uS you have between each bit of the midi stream. There again you have to mess with the conf to slow the serial comms down (it is setup for the standard, 300, 600, 1200, ... 9600, .. 115200 and none of these fall in the range of tolerance for MIDI).
STILL -- perhaps the BEST reason for buying an RPi2 is WITH an external USB card (the £2 versions!) you can get decent output from ZynAddSubFX. This is an awesome synth. I loved using it on my P4 1.5G 2GHz pc (still infront of me in Miniaktools garage) but now I can run it on a £30 + £2 computer ... freaking awesome.
So for sure when one considered MIDI and computers are made for eachother -- go for it!
I tried to compiler Ctrlr for RPI last week but failed. Still, hopefully more cycles next year.
Regards
Steve H