[sdiy] MIDI velocity

[sleepy_dog at gmx.de]

I wondered about this "scanning all the keys all the time".
I'm only familar with stm32 platform (Also cheap! you could even get an 
stmf100 in a 144pin LQFP package for about 4,- EUR and do this even 
without any muxing matrix stuff or whatever way this is done with such 
keyboards :-D ),
and there, I'd have, say, 8 ports of 16 pins each which are enough for 
2x61 switches.
So 4 ports are for all first-switches on all keys, 4 ports are for the 
second ones.
So you might do 8 ports reads, taking 2 cycles each I think, @ 24MHz. 
Doing this in a timer interrupt at 8kHz seems feasible.
Each of the 61 keys has a maybe 16bit counter.
24 MHz /  8000 Hz = 3000 cycles for all this stuff, I think 2 cycles x 8 
ports, + some checking logic which ports are not all zero and then 
looking in more detail at the bits of those which aren't,  + (worst 
case) 61 conditional increments fit well in those 3000 cycles. You might 
even be able to display stuff on an LCD or so with that same processor. 
If that 144pin beast is unwieldy, 3x 48pin LQFP stm32f030 for 0.8 € 
each, each scanning 1/3 of the keys, one being master and joining all 
the MIDI event streams to one, might do?
Or maybe I'm talking nonsense because one can't access all the keyboard 
lines that way and one really has to use some kind of muxing logic?
I faintly remember somethig like that with the Fatar synth action keybed 
I have lying around... Alas I did not have time yet to build the 
monstrous MIDI controller I envision, but am glad to have bought this 
before Doepfer apparently stopped selling them... SO who says buying 
stuff you don't need right now has to be bad... :-D
Oh, on a tangent again...

Steve

Am 05.04.2016 um 18:47 schrieb Ingo Debus:
>> Am 05.04.2016 um 13:43 schrieb Richie Burnett <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk>:
>>
>>   Is it reasonable to expect that I could use a low-end micro (e.g. PIC) to
>> scan a 61-key Fatar velocity sensitive keyboard with sufficient velocity
>> resolution to work well?
> Maybe there’s a smarter way than scanning the whole keyboard all the time? For instance, in wait-for-key mode all the keys are in parallel, so when one key is pressed, the processor can react very quickly (thus measure the time very exactly), without knowing at first which key it was. Then, while the key is travelling, the keyboard is scanned to find the key. Then the processor waits until the key hits its final position and measures the time again.
>
> It would also be less noisy, because the keyboard is only scanned when a key actually is pressed.
>
> Some problems might arise, what happens when a key is pressed while another one is on its way?
>
> Ingo
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy