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

[ChristianH]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2012 15:58:35 +0100 Olivier Gillet <ol.gillet at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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...

When doing AVR development (not Arduino, but free style hardware), I
dedicate an AVR port to an (optional) LCD (4+3 bits needed).

Was a bit expensive on the Mega32 in terms of port bits, since there are
only 4 byte ports - but once I started using the Mega64, there's usually
enough ports to afford that approch.

Christian