Back to MIDI

… and again and again 😀

So the LEGO Laser Harp v2 is almost done. A few more bricks here and there.

But it the meanwhile I had to test my MIDI ideas… and got a MiDiPLUS miniEngine USB as a cheap portable MIDI sound engineso I don’t have to use a computer (yeah… as if!)

Then I got back to the MINDSTORMS pneumatic pressure sensor idea and made a sort of LEGO MIDI Trumpet:

Then I got carried away and made my own LEGO MIDI Drum Kit:

All these using USB MIDI Adapters and plain MIDI equipment (I now also have a MIDI Merger). Even joined my MIDI keyboards to the MIDI network thanks to Patchbox OS running on a Raspberry Pi with a USB MIDI adapter for the older keyboard (DIN5) and plain USB cables for the newer ones.

But the original idea was making MIDI instruments without cables and gadgets (except for the WiFi dongle) so I got a little back again and made a few tests with multimidicast (ipMIDI).

The Drum Kit works great with MIDI cables… but extremely bad with ipMIDI when using the Raspberry Pi with Patchbox OS as an ipMIDI gateway. High latency and poor sensibility when using MODEP software generators.

So gave up MODEP and jack and used just a USB MIDI adapter to connect the ipMIDI gateway to the MiDiPLUS miniEngine USB. Much better… but still some latency.

So I just need to make a few more adjustments to finish my LEGO ipMIDI Drum Kit. Then will test how this thing scales out with more ipMIDI instruments.