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Showing posts from June, 2014

Re-purposing an old MIDI interface - part 1

I hate to throw things away. I've had an old serial port MIDI interface lying around the house for 20 years doing nothing. It was from Windows 3.1 days, and was non-upgradable to Windows 95. But now it's time to bring it back to life. First some pictures... The Original Box Unboxed MIDI ports at the other end 25-pin serial port at one end My idea is to make it into a very simple sequencer based on the Arduino, with both MIDI in and out capability plus a bunch of other features whilst retaining the original box for nostalgia. So let's take a look inside and see if there is anything that can be salvaged... Internals Well, not much really, there are the ports which I can definitely use plus a few resistor, diodes and capacitors, some of which may be usable in my new project but probably not worth the hassle of unsoldering. Then there are 2 transistors, which I will save for other projects and what looks like an optocoupler on the MIDI-in side. The