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

[Dave Brown]

When I did my LCD Display for my ComputerVoltageSource I had the same issue.
I didn't want to consume processing power and was out of pins.  I took a
slightly different approach and made a MIDI sysex display.  It passes
through the MIDI and operates on the sysex LCD commands without passing them
through.  It works quite well.

http://modularsynthesis.com/cvs/cvs2.htm

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl] On Behalf Of Matthew Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 12:49 PM
To: synthdiy diy
Subject: Re: [sdiy] midi clock to GATE (or trigger) converter with
Arduino???

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.
--
Matthew Smith