Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS VS arduino_midi_library

For me, it was the second application I ever released, when I was a student at university and still didn't really know how to program properly.

The application was Dash Board[1] for Newton OS, and it only ran on the final generation of Newton hardware (created by Apple, but spun out as a separate company in its final days, before being killed by Steve Jobs shortly after his return).

It "only" sold a few thousand copies. (But it was during the warez heyday, and I am pretty sure there were also tens of thousands of bootleg copies being used, thanks to the registration code generator by "DocNZ" that was widely shared on Hotline back then.)

But that was really pretty great, since the final MP2000/2100 generation of hardware it required was thought to have only sold about 200,000 devices in total.

I have since had a fairly normal software engineer career, and have worked on apps that shipped far more copies, and today I work on customer facing web applications and API SDKs that have more users, and arguably do stuff that is more "important" (e.g. help companies manage large fleets of machines/robots/IoT stuff) than what Dash Board did — which was basically just improve the user interface of the Newton.

But it's 100% clear to me that the magnitude of user impact of Dash Board was much higher than any other thing I've built. People really loved it — I know because hundreds of them actually wrote to us to let us know. (LOL I mean wrote to me "me" — old habits of pretending the company wasn't just one student in his tiny apartment die hard).

Of course, I made more money later, and worked on things that touched a much larger number of people's lives. But "impact" has both X and Y axes. It was the depth of the users' fondness for Dash Board that makes it eclipse everything since. I don't think there are that many chances to just go for "user delight" as the number one metric.

For me, developer satisfaction is a function of that user delight more than anything else.

[1]: http://www.fivespeedsoftware.com/dashboard

[2]: 15 years later, I open-sourced the code and gave it a proper retrospective: https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS

The experience of resurrecting this software is similar to the odyssey of Mason Mark, detailed here.

That makes me wonder how often one runs across a synth that doesn't support running status. I'm working on a MIDI controller myself, and that's a thing I probably ought to enable if I want the lowest latency.

It seems the standard MIDI libraries that Arduino uses don't enable it by default, but it's a configuration option you can turn on, along with a note not to try to use it with USB[1].

[1] https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library/bl...

take a look here

The Arduino MIDI Library [1]. Back in 2009, I learned C++ to build it and control my guitar effects pedals with custom electronics as part of my engineering degree.

[1] https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library

Your project can be broken up into a number of subprojects. For keyscanning you don't need additional hardware, just the pins from the ribbon cables going to the arduino's digital pins and ground. Since the keys are just switches (two per key, the time difference between the two switches closing giving the source of velocity), you could start with some examples from the Arduino MIDI library (https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library). To test MIDI sending you don't even need to start from the keybed just yet, and if you do, you can start with a single key. Once you've got that part figured out end to end (key press/release generates note on/off events) you can work on iterating through the matrix, CC controls etc. MIDI out can be done in different ways. With a 5 pin DIN plug you'd just need two 220 ohm resistors.

On an Arduino compatible platform the configuration of the baud rate at the bare metal layer is taken care of by the library when you call its begin() method. Looking at the example code included with the library it appears that there are no timer interrupts or anything like that required of you in order to use it. Another thing that jumps out is that the call to read() returns a non-zero value if anything has been received that you should use to predicate whether any further attention needs to be spent on it by your code. You may know this but it wasn't apparent from the loop() { MIDI.read\`() }` example that you gave above.

As i have started to combine this with Midi Implementation from FourtySevenEffects lib, i only have done a quick test with two/three strips and did discover follwing issue(s):

Using a library for the midi shield you can register two functions as callbacks. One callback for NoteOn(...) messages and one for NoteOff(...) messages. But thre is much more. In the end the source of truth should always be the docs for the library itself.

Click the link to github (second link in the article) and there's all the source code: https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library

Here’s a library that might work.