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

[Matthew Smith]

Quoth ChristianH at 02/03/12 02:30...
...
> When doing AVR development (not Arduino, but free style hardware), I
> dedicate an AVR port to an (optional) LCD (4+3 bits needed)
...

There's a less expensive (in terms of pins) solution - use an I2C LCD.

You can either use a separate device to do I2C to parallel (ie: make 
your own I2C display) or buy one. Element14 has been listing I2C LCDs at 
what I'd consider silly cheap prices - about $8 - since December. Last I 
heard was that stock was supposed to be coming in sometime this month.

Personally, I can't wait for these to turn up. (And probably neither can 
my Element14 account manager, as I've been pestering him about them.) 
Not only does it save on pins, they are little more expensive than 
parallel LCDs, but use of the I2C peripheral of a microcontroller means 
that you can turn some of the work over to a peripheral, unloading the 
CPU core.

Of course, for the purposes of this exercise, you can skip the I2C 
altogether, chuck a daughter board on the back of an LCD doing MIDI to 
parallel. With many microcontrollers having internal clock oscillators 
available at integer MHz, this would be a very cheap (in parts) 
solution, as you'd only need an optoisolator, diode, couple of 
resistors, decoupling capacitor, uC, board, hardware.

M

-- 
Matthew Smith

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