Friday, July 28, 2006
Midibox inside
After 9 hours of usage, my pink test LED has not changed its color, so now I’m happily assuming that the pink will be quite stable.
So now, what actually will be the purpose of my MIDI keytar? First of all, it is only a controller. That means that it will not produce a sound itself, but only control another electronic MIDI instrument such as a synthesizer or a computer with music software. With MIDI, you can send information about what note should be played with which instrument and lots of other parameters. So the keytar will be something like those programmable remote controls for your TV and DVD player, only for music.
It will have buttons that can be pressed, pots that can be turned, sliders that, well, slide, and lots of LEDs that show if something is activated or not. I’ll write a detailed recollection of my ideas for the instrument for the next part of this series of articles.
Time to reveal what will actually go inside the hollow plastic guitar. MIDI is a serial data protocol, so you need some kind of controller circuit to generate a MIDI data stream. You cannot just connect switches or sliders directly to some synthesizer. I have decided to use the very well-documented Midibox64 of the do-it-yourself Midibox platform available on uCApps.de.
Generally, Midibox is a modular system for building your own synthesizers and MIDI controllers. Each application consists of several connected hardware modules and some software running on the project’s own MIOS operating system on a microprocessor which is the core of each system.
The application called Midibox64 is capable of connecting up tp 64 switches, 64 pots and 64 LEDs via MIDI. I will be using 24 switches, 16 pots and 32 LEDs, which is already a lot. This is a complete do-it-yourself project, but I don’t want to start from zero completely, so I will build a fairly standard Midibox64 system using pre-made circuit boards and not try to reinvent the wheel. I have already ordered all necessary boards and electronic components which only leaves me with soldering everything.
Keytar Project:
Part 2: Pink is the new LED
Part 4: Soldering
