NoCoin VS arduino_midi_library

My most impactful project was definitely NoCoin [0], the first web miner blocker. Back when Monero miners started appearing and sneakily mining on pages, like The Pirate Bay for example, I decided to throw together a browser extension that would simply block requests to the resources that hosted these mining scripts. The project was in no way a technical achievement, it was simply intercepting requests and blocking them based on a list. I could have very well added the resources to some other project like uBlock origin. But it got traction, ended up in the press (WIRED, Motherboard, Gizmodo) and ultimately started being integrated within browsers (Opera was first) and most of the popular ad blockers. The project lost its relevance as everyone else was doing it better and maintaining the list of blocked resources was too time consuming for me. Nevertheless, the goal was achieved, which was to "get rid" of crypto mining on the web. The mission got carried by bigger actors, which brings me more satisfaction than the popularity of the project.

Another impactful project of mine was also a browser extension. Internal tool that started as a lunch time project to make my team's life easier. Can't go in detail on that one, but basically they liked it and start suggesting improvements. So did a department that was working with us. And bit by bit, it became a really useful tool that became standard in these departments. Last I heard, the tool is now deployed company-wide. Crazy to think it started just from some lunch time hacking :-)

[0] https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin

Which in of itself is not a huge dealbreaker since the code is open source and can be found Here, unfortunately after reading their GitHub they are no longer supporting the extension (which makes sense since browsers can stop most mining activity nowadays)

Genuine tip, lots of those sites use your computer to mine bitcoin. If you download a browser extension like No Coin, the videos load a lot faster. Can't verify it for every site, but when it works, it works.

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.