Some Netduino, some MIDI, a little breadboarding...

What is cooler than mixing inexpensive embedded hardware and .Net development? Adding music to the mix! Pete Brown has taken the very cool Netduino and shown us how to connect to, and parse, MIDI input.

Accepting MIDI Serial Input with the Netduino

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At one point, I even messed around with creating a software synthesizer using Silverlight. I've decided to take what I learned from that, and implement a simple synthesizer using the Netduino. For the first step, I thought I'd try to implement simple MIDI-in functionality so I can access the Netduino from my keyboard controller.

This is a really simple MIDI interface, but involves a number of parts you likely don't have hanging around. If that sounds like a pain, you can purchase a MIDIshield with a more robust implementation.

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There’s just nothing like a little breadboarding in the morning…

Once Pete has helped us build the interface, he then helps us with Parsing Serial MIDI Messages with the Netduino

"In my previous post on this topic, I set up the Netduino to receive MIDI messages via the serial input on the board. In that example, I simply blinked an LED when the messages arrived. This time, I want to actually parse the messages.

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Thinking about the possibilities in playing with this is pretty exciting. I love the idea of not only hooking the real world into my computer, but into small/embedded devices that I can write .Net code for. That’s cool…

Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:

• Six Places Where I buy Netduino and other Electronics Bits
• New in the Maker Shed: Netduino, a .NET-powered open source electronics platform
• TWC9: Netduino, Twitter oAuth in Windows Phone, App skinning, and universal physics
• Netduino - .NET Micro Framework, open source, electronics platform, free (software), code walk though, cool…