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Because my Waldorf Midibay became too small for connecting all of my MIDI equipment, I went ahead and designed my own MIDI matrix / programmable patchbay. The modular MIDIbox Matrix has up to 56 input and 56 output ports and provides a smart solution for the fact that not all MIDI equipment is usually located in the same rack or corner of the studio space.   MIDIbox Matrix features break-out boxes (BOBs) that give access to 4 MIDI in and 4 MIDI out ports at a time. These are connected via 9-pin serial cables to the main unit and are designed to be conveniently placed in the back of your rack, e.g. attached to the inner sidewall of a rack enclosure with screws or velcro tape. This means that instead of running 8 MIDI cables to the MIDIbox Matrix in order to connect four synths, you only need a single, cheap serial cable from your side rack to the center point of your matrix.   Two BOBs each connect to a single I/O board, which does all the level shifting and signal refreshing. Up to seven I/O boards can be attached to the heart of the MIDIbox Matrix, an FPGA-based switching and routing logic that is controlled via a core board such as the STM32 or the LPC17.   As the system is highly modular, it is possible to start with a low port count (4) and then increase the number of available ports by simply adding I/O boards and BOBs as needed. Fully loaded, i.e. offering 56 input and 56 output MIDI ports, the MIDIbox Matrix consists of 1x FPGA board 7x I/O boards 14x BOBs plus a core board and the PCB holding the user interface.   This is how a BOB looks like in my setup:   Software-wise, this is almost ready - everything works as expected, just the PANIC button has to be implemented in the next weeks, and some code cleanup will be necessary. You can find more documentation in the Wiki if you are interested.   Kind regards, ilmenator