Did I say SW UART?? No... no... HW UART

After investigating the possibility of using SW UART for MIDI out, I decided to give up... I had lots of issues getting reliable serial baudrate conversion and did not have enough spare time to investigate further, as can be seen based on my lack of posts in the last few months. So I am now using HW UART, 31250 in, 31250 out... no conversions... and that seems to be working fine. Took me some time to actually get it right, I thought I was also loosing bits there, until I found out about the running status in Midi... dammed it.. should have read the midi specs!!!

On the Raspi side, I plan to do as explained here to get the serial port to work at 31250.

SW UART

My plan is to have my AVR board handle midi Input and send that to the Raspberry PI (as well as the potentiometer and switches status) through 38400bps serial port of the Raspberry Pi. To do so, the AVR will be receiving MIDI through the HW UART and will be sending serial data by bit banging.
I tried using the SW UART implementation of AVR lib, but it seems to be failing every now and then (actually very often). I was expecting it to "just work" and let me work on other stuff, but it seems like I am going to have to spend some time debugging the code from AVR lib or looking for other alternatives... I am not big expert on AVR coding, so I expect a few nights of intensive work.
Meanwhile, I am almost done modifying rtMidi to allow Midi comming through serial port.

Next Steps

Here is a list of what I will be working on next:

1. Implement my MIDI to serial conversion: I will be doing a MIDI to 38400kbps serial conversion using an AVR micro. The reasons for doing this are:
• USB MIDI is a CPU hog in the Raspberry Pi
• I am still not sure if the raspberry Pi supports MIDI baud rates or not.
• I want to add some controls to the Pi that will use the same micro and will be sent to the Pi through the same serial
2. Add the control of the knobs and switches (get the knobs and switches status and send it to the Pi).
3. Put everything into a nice case.
4. Add missing functionality to the VA synth (as explained here).
5. Add missing functionality to  the Monome application.

I am hoping to finish 1 and 2 within the next 2 weeks. We will see...