[sdiy] midi clock to GATE (or trigger) converter with Arduino???

[Olivier Gillet]

Just to make things clear:

MIDI in/out is trivial on the arduino.

The problem discussed here is trying to do the following:
* Use the RX port of the UART to receive MIDI.
* Use the TX port of the UART to send debug information to a computer
(via the built-in serial > USB chip on the arduino board).

The RX and TX sections of the UART have the same clock ; so the MIDI
baud rate of 31250 has to be used. It turns out that many terminal
applications or serial port drivers (including the debug terminal
built into the arduino IDE ; and the FTDI drivers for the USB > serial
chip used on the Arduino board) do not list 31250 as an acceptable
baud rate making the "send debug information to a computer" part
difficult.

There are other "creative" options for debugging:
- LED / scope / logic analyzer on a spare port. Best when debugging
anything related to timing as it only has a 1 CPU clock overhead.
- Encapsulating debug data as a stream of MIDI real time messages, and
sending the debug information to a MIDI out.
- Bit-banging serial on another port at 1200 bps to a LCD module with
serial interface or another FTDI dongle...

Olivier