Full Fat MIDI Cheesebox is coming

The finished version will have the lid on properly…..

I’ve been working on an upgrade for the original PICO MIDI Cheesebox. This one incorporates a MIDI sound generator and extra flashing lights. It’s been fun to make.

Maybe I should make a printed circuit board….

I’m using the PCB version of the cheesebox and connecting it directly to the light display PICO from the Chocolate Synthbox. The light display changes in time with the music. The original version of my lights responded to special messages sent from the synthesizer. I’ve changed things a bit. The latest version responds to MIDI messages. Last might at the hardware meetup I was trying to get the cheesebox to send messages out of two serial ports, one for the sound generator and the other for the light display. This turned out to be tricky because some of the serial data pins I wanted to use have been allocated to other things.

So this morning I just connected the display PICO to the same cheesebox serial output as the MIDI sound device. Sending serial data from one pin to more than one device was probably not the best way to solve the problem, but it did have the advantage of working perfectly. Then, all I’ve had to do is re-write the message code in the display PICO so that it understands MIDI and changes the lights in response. The final touch will be to get all this boxed up and working. I’ll put all the designs and software on GitHub once I’ve made them all work.