Tuesday, June 16, 2009

DrumBot Project Update



BTW - I order a few of these surplus Saw 3 toys from All Electronics. For $2 you get a digital voice recorder part and even two included AAA batteries. Just the battery holder is worth that!
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So far so good. My soldering skills seem to have been good enough to get the MSA-R board working properly despite a few questionable solder joints. The one LED stays lit and the other one comes on and then goes off as its suppose to - I did have the MIDI connector soldered on wrong which I learned is a common mistake according to the Highly Liquid web site. Note to self - Read the diagrams with care!

I got a really cheap MIDI to USB cord off of Ebay and used Anvil Studio (free MIDI composer program) to generate some MIDI signals. Anvil has a nice MIDI test feature that generates about 12 notes over and over so you can test your MIDI ins and outs.

For who knows why I couldn't get my Windows NT computer to work with the DrumBot. I have a zillion USB ports in use so maybe that was the problem. Anyway I tried it on my super slow Vista laptop and had success! But I did have to download a little Vista Midi Mapper utility. Here are the resources I used:


Midi Mapper for Vista
http://akkordwechsel.de/15-windows-vista-und-der-midi-mapper/


Anvil Studio
http://www.anvilstudio.com/


I set the MIDI out to channel 13 and set the DIP switches to channel 13 and the note range of around 60 to 70 which is where Anvil Studio runs its test. Success! The MIDI cable lit out as sending data OUT and the LED on the MSA-R blinked with the incoming notes.

Next up - Raid Caffrey's collection of talking Happy Meal toys and add some motors and solenoids!

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