What Did Deborah Sampson Accomplish

Unraveling the Mysteries ...

After much work, we finally have a stable version of the transmission program with which we work. Today we bring the first evidence of communication between the PC and microcontroller. We recommend that you take a tour of the previous entries MIDI bare to be aware of the advances that have so far.

Breadboard with test track.

Well, due to the lack of Linux drivers for serial-USB converter to use to transmit data from the PC, we work on a virtual machine running Windows XP. The application is developed in Java and use NetBeans development environment (you can download the newest version of the IDE with the new version of java here.)

The program works as follows:

1. Open MIDI file.
2. Decode. Discriminating
3. message properties ON / OFF.
   
4. Send messages to the microcontroller via RS232.

use the PIC18F4550 microcontroller as receiver of the data, we have no particular reason to use that model rather than the number of free pins you have, plus we already had one, maybe in the future is replaced by a microcontroller a little less "left."

As mentioned in previous entries MIDI naked, data transmission occurs serially. When you load the MIDI data to the microcontroller, the application on the PC serial port sends a string to a press note and the eighth in which it is located. This action is repeated every few minutes depending on the structure of melody charged. The microcontroller works

voltage TTL, which is why when communicating serially with a micro computer to use the MAX232 integrated circuit, the circuit changes the TTL levels to RS-232 standard in TX, and RS-232 levels to TTL RX. The typical circuit is shown in the figure below:

MAX232 Connection Diagram.

The format in which data is sent is the following

• G4: Note the Sun in the fourth octave.
• Y4: Note F sharp in the fourth octave. Etc.

Transmission of data from the application.

The microcontroller compares the received string and executes appropriate actions depending on the octave in which the note is received. For these preliminary tests declare an output pin for each note and ignore for now the information octaves. In each output pin connect a LED (the robot would solenoids) that shows whether or not the note is being struck.

Video of the first tests. We are happy to report that they were all satisfactory.

Child: Listen Mr. orc ... Why not try a little harder and informed PC and microphone via USB?
Orc: Why not.