Please excuse this newbie

[Jonathan Farmer]

Hello,

I am brand new to the MIDIBox world. I thought I would spend a moment to introduce myself, since I intend to be an active contributor on this forum. I also have a few opening questions that I will pose later on.

My name is Jonathan Farmer. I live in the States, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I graduated from Drexel University (in Philadelphia) in June 2007 with a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering. Since graduation, I have worked as an Embedded Control Software Engineer for Honeywell International Inc. Just to make it clear right now, I DO NOT make the thermostats. I design and write software for this industrial controller and other related devices.

I am a musician. I have played guitar and sung since I was 14 years old, and I have recently began to play drums and bass and hope to play keyboard/piano in the future. It is this aspect of my life that brings me to MIDIBox. There are millions of products on the market for musicians, most of them use MIDI, all of them are expensive, and none of them do what you really want them to. I intend to design and build solutions for myself.

Two projects are currently on my "docket." I am sure that more will soon follow.

1. MIDI-controlled Variax - If you are not familiar with the Variax guitar, please visit the manufacturers website here. I will be moving all the electronics into a rack-mount enclosure and replacing the manual controls (knobs and buttons) with the MIOS32 platform.
   
2. MIDI controller pedalboard - This project will probably be on-going for years. I intend to take all the features of the best known MIDI controller pedalboards and integrate them into one of my own design, as well as adding in some customizations for specific hardware that I own (eg Axe-Fx Ultra and SwitchBlade 8).
   

I have ordered CORE32, DIN and DOUT kits from SmashTV. These parts are the beginning of my development and test setup. I decided to start with the STM32-based MIOS32 than the PIC-based MIOS because I am more comfortable with c code than assembly language.

On to my questions! I am a big fan of in-circuit debugging. I am hoping that there is an IDE that will suit this purpose. My reading so far tells me that it is probably Eclipse, integrated with OpenOCD using JTAG to attach to the processor. I have never used Eclipse. I have never used OpenOCD. Is there a "step-by-step" available for setting-up this development environment? Also, is there a list of supported USB/JTAG adapters for this environment?

Thanks much!

JF

[lylehaze]

Hello,

I am brand new to the MIDIBox world. I thought I would spend a moment to introduce myself, since I intend to be an active contributor on this forum. I also have a few opening questions that I will pose later on.

My name is Jonathan Farmer.

...

Welcome aboard!!

I think you'll find this is a great community to work (play) in.

We are a diverse bunch, but we all share a common thread of interest in MIOS , and lately MIOS32.

My own experience has been with the older PIC based MIOS so far.. I can tell you that one of it's strengths is that once the bootloader is programmed (usually by Smash), we can edit and upload applications directly from MIDI, without need of any programmers or JTAG modules. This makes it much more friendly to newbies that might not own a lot of programming equipment. I'm sure that one goal of MIOS32 is to be equally easy to use.

MIOS8 does support the C language.. using a freeware C toolchain. Since I prefer PIC ASM, I have the tools installed, but I have not got too close with them yet. I expect I'll move over to C as I switch to Core32.

I must also tell you that MIOS32 is still developing. most of the existing applications have not been ported over yet, or at least have not yet been released in the 32 bit versions.

There is a HUGE amount of information in the WIKI. there's also a chat room for live discussions.

I'll let those who have been playing with the Core32 regularly describe the current state in more detail.

Have Fun,

LyleHaze