jon_oz

hmmm... sorry, perhaps i was unclear in my waffling. the only thing i'm trying to achieve is to get midi signals from my keyboard to my PC, without the use of a PIC or any kind of external processing. that's it. i know a commercial interface would probably only cost $20 or so... i'm doing this more out of curiosity, and because i'd use it so infrequently that i don't really want to outlay anything. call me stubborn...

hi all, this may sound stupid to experienced electronics experts, but it's something that i think would benefit many impoverished backyard tinkerers like myself if it were possible... i'm trying to design a midi input (just an input at this stage) for my pc - without the use of any external microcontrollers, without using a soundcard midi port, just wiring directly to a usb or serial port, probably using an optocoupler. yes, i know it sounds silly. and yes, it is re-inventing the wheel - a wheel that costs about US$20 if you look around hard enough. but! please humor me for a while. i know standard PC serial ports aren't capable of running at 31250 baud. but i know they are capable of much higher speeds - particularly USB ports. if i'm not mistaken, you can use drivers (see the arduino site) that allow a USB port to operate more or less as if it were an oldschool serial port (is anyone able to elaborate on how this works?). my idea is that you could run a USB as an emulated serial port at a very fast rate (i've read that 1+Mbaud is possible...?), and basically count the number of clock ticks between 'high' inputs. midi commands always begin with a high input (correct?), so using simple division surely it's possible to figure out the shape of the midi data coming in... even if it is at a non-supported baudrate. then it's just a matter of routing the data to virtual midi devices. as you can probably tell, i'm very much a newcomer to serial comms (and electronics in general, really) so i'd really appreciate if someone could help out with a few design ideas and explanations of concepts. even if it means telling me it's definitely impossible! jon.