Showing posts with label nord g2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nord g2. Show all posts

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The worlds ugliest midi controller


Okay, this is my first electronic project. Maybe more practicing with the Dremel would have been better...

I needed a small midi device that I could put on my Nord Wave keyboard to control my Nord G2 Modular Rack on stage so I don't have to bring a computer to simply change the volume/change preset.

The arduino was a perfect fit for this since it can easily work with midi. The midi input is quite straight foward, a 6n138 octocoupler does the job. I took this advice and it worked perfectly: led midi controller. The arduino is pretty fast, I never lost a midi "byte" and it does repeat midi message without problems.



The only problem is that at first, I was trying to filter the midi message in the same function; if I got a midi 0x90 (note on) message, I was using

while ( Serial.available() == 0 );
byte2 = Serial.read();
while ( Serial.available() == 0 );
byte3 = Serial.read();

That solution didn't worked, I was loosing midi byte message and my filter process was waiting for a message that was already sent by the synth. The only solution I found is to process midi message with a buffer, so the Serial.available() was always executed in the arduino loop() function.

Now this code works. Now I really look amateur on stage.

source code