Offline
Jelly Stone park, MD USA
catskull wrote:

Hey Yogi, thanks for your post. I've actually been working on this quietly for a bit now, more as a personal hobby project than anything. For my initial version, here's what I'm shooting for:
- Each of the 4 outputs are channel selectable. Regardless of input channel.
- Volume setting or offset per channel. So you could set the output volume of CH1 to 127 (max), or you could increase it by a factor. Maybe a percentage of the original volume, or by a constant. That way dynamics may still work.
- Pitch Offset. This will probably be a percentage. Almost like a pitch wheel but more fixed.
- As cheap as possible. I'm hoping for $50 including a semi-decent case.
- Actually purchasable. Seems like most devices like this are harder to buy, like the two you posted. No PM'ing people on forums.

Everything is/will be released as free and open source under GPLv2. If you or other want to add your own features, that will totally be supported! And contributions back to the "official" firmware would be nice!

I've actually lost a bit of steam on this, so your post has kind of reignited my spark a bit. Let me know if you have any questions.

  Nice feature set, will be keeping an eye on the project. This sort of box would really help when you have a few tone generators and want to layer them up. Otherwise you need to route everything through a PC and use something like MidiOx.
  @ Ledfyr I think I looked at your RPi project, very interesting. I'm really N00b with these and 'nix too, just got one and been thinking about which way to go. Leaning towards a real compact soft seq sort of thing. Really like Seq24 on the PC here and think it would be cool on a 'pad' type setup. Or maybe use it as a tracker box.
Yogi

Offline
Ardèche, France

I'm definitely interested. But it makes me sad now to have modified my old PS/2 keyboard. Your adapter is the future.

Offline
Jazzmarazz wrote:

I'll shoot an email to benn. It's  simple ROM only, no MBC cart.

With a help from benn, managed to write support for 32k cart myself. Hooray for modifiable software smile

Offline
Michigan
rebb wrote:
Jazzmarazz wrote:

I'll shoot an email to benn. It's  simple ROM only, no MBC cart.

With a help from benn, managed to write support for 32k cart myself. Hooray for modifiable software smile

Hah, excellent. Do you mind sharing the details?

Offline

Benn promised to add it for next release. It's just byte by byte for now, but with 32k cart it's not that much issue.

Offline
NUMBSKULL

I don't think I ever posted here, but the PS/2 jack is now integrated into the regular keyboard mode. Before it had it's own mode, but now it's just the regular keyboard mode. The cool thing is you can use both midi and a PS/2 keyboard at the same time! Thanks to lskeyjay for the idea and help testing, and trash80 for help coding. Because of some uniqueness with the way the PS/2 library works, I had to move the status led to a different pin. So there are breaking changes with the official release, but it's just a matter of moving the led to a different pin. You can grab the modified source code here: https://github.com/catskull/Arduinoboy/ … e-keyboard

Also, the kits are updated for Arduinoboy version 1.3!

Offline
NUMBSKULL

Dev boards have been received. This makes firmware development 5x easier!

Offline
Jelly Stone park, MD USA

WOW, looks interesting! 5 DIN, what's the geometry? USB midi or just power?
smile Yogi

Offline
NUMBSKULL
yogi wrote:

WOW, looks interesting! 5 DIN, what's the geometry? USB midi or just power?
smile Yogi

4x midi outputs, 1 midi input.

USB for power only. There is discussion about adding a usb-serial chip, which would allow you to use a midi to serial program on your pc to do usb midi. Not sure if it's worth the overhead though. Totally open to suggestions!

For anyone interested, the code is free software (GPLv3) and available on github: https://github.com/catskull/midi_router/

Kind of a mess right now though.

Offline
IL, US

smart move going with a separate power source rather than relying on power over midi din. a surprisingly high number of devices don't send power over din these days (some for understandable reasons, such as piggy midi boxes, battery life on gp2x is rough enough without having to power other devices)

Offline
NUMBSKULL
e.s.c. wrote:

smart move going with a separate power source rather than relying on power over midi din. a surprisingly high number of devices don't send power over din these days (some for understandable reasons, such as piggy midi boxes, battery life on gp2x is rough enough without having to power other devices)

It wasn't really a move on my part, power over midi is not standard and is up to the manufacturer. This system needs 5v but many synths use something else, it's just not a game I want to play!

Offline
IL, US

midisolutions oddly does NOT use external power supplies for their midi thru boxes. not even the T8 rackmount.. so, you're ahead of one of the biggest manufacturers of midi peripherals

Offline
NUMBSKULL

If anyone is using my 32k cart and would like to reflash it with BennVenn's JoeyJoebags flasher, I have a build of the software available. It adds support for the cart, as well as optimized the software to run on OSX.

Credit goes to rebb and ben for figuring out the flash routing and rebb for making the software work on OSX.

Get it here: https://github.com/catskull/JoeyJoebags

Last edited by catskull (Dec 15, 2016 9:44 pm)

Offline
NUMBSKULL

I decided to make a Facebook page for the shop, check it out here: https://www.facebook.com/catskullelectronics

Offline
NUMBSKULL

double post

Last edited by catskull (Dec 22, 2016 4:25 am)

Offline
NUMBSKULL

Hot new product alert! MBC5 cart, LSDJ compatible! Get it while it's hot:

http://catskullelectronics.com/mbc5cart

http://catskullelectronics.com/mbc5cart

Last edited by catskull (Mar 11, 2017 5:54 am)