My friend and fellow engineering, Loren Wyard-Scott, re-introduced me to pinball machines a few years ago. His enthusiasm for these machines got me thinking that they might make good platforms for engineering capstone projects. So, for the past couple of years I've been getting my capstone students to work on acquiring older machines and updating […]
When I was a kid I would spend holidays with my grandparents in Michigan and Florida. It was during one of those holidays in the early 1980s that my grandparents introduced us to their fancy new microwave oven. Today, we take them for granted, but back in the 1970s are and 1980s they were magical. […]
It's August of 2026 and the Mbed platform is dead. You're forgiven if you don't know what Mbed is. It can be summarized this way: Mbed was a cloud service to help engineers make stuff on little chips. Basically, think of it like Google Docs for microchips. It launched in 2009, around the time that […]
There are plenty of ways to develop MIDI 1.0 applications on microcontrollers, such as the well-respected non-TinyUSB MIDI 1.0 library by Fourty Seven Effects library. That's great for general Arduino projects. However, here we're going to to continue in the direction we started in Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series -- so […]
In Part 1 I looked into how one could create a simple USB program to run on the RP2350. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more that can be done via the USB port on a microcontroller like the RP2350! As described in this 2021 post on a TinyUSB […]
As I continue exploring MIDI on Arduino wth 32bit processors like the RP2350, it's clear that there are a lot of people interested in and working on sound and music applications with microcontrollers, including Phil Schatzman (Arduino MIDI, Arduino Audio Tools, and Synthesis Toolkit). While many of his projects don't use TinyUSB under-the-hood, his latest […]
So, I've got a Seeed Studio Xiao RP2350. It's a minimalist RP2350 microcontroller board. Can it use its USB-C port to output MIDI 1.0 notes over USB? Yes. Here's how... I... The code that I used is: It compiles and loads on to the RP2350. I verified it using MTSL: Simple and easy. James Andrew […]
I am interested in developing MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 applications on embedded devices. As part of Designing Sound Futures, I worked with Mohaimen Hassan on Shetu, the very first MIDI 2.0 device produced in an academic setting. Unlike other attempts, it was written completely in C, with no other libraries or programming languages. The […]
When I first started programming in Java I thought that graphics would be best with a framework like JavaFX. It was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. I switched to using the Princeton Standard Library with my students and find that it works great for things like graphs, etc. even though […]
Back when I was a PhD student at McGill, our lab had a rule of thumb when it came to robot tests: if the robot can't repeat the test at least ten times then it can't do it. You can see this in Dave McMordie's thesis, in Ned Moore's thesis, in Neil Neville's thesis and […]