This week I researched the hardware necessary for the MIDI Out and Video Out portions of our design as well as approaches for how to handle turning an Arduino into a MIDI device. I settled on using the Arduino Due for MIDI, as that board has a direct serial connection to USB as well as ARM cores for minimal latency and lots of GPIO. The board unfortunately operates at 3.3V instead of 5V, so I made sure to order some voltage regulators to ensure compatibility between the various boards in our system. After conducting research on the Video Out portion of our project we realized that a TFT display or something similar will not meet our requirements, as SPI cannot be driven fast enough to reliably draw live video. As such we are now looking into the possibility of using either the video out ports on the Jetson itself or the HDMI port on a RPi. However, since we’re still holding out hope that our video software can run in parallel with the CV software on the Jetson, as of now we’ve decided not to order a RPi until we’ve confirmed that the Jetson won’t work. These parts have been ordered and will hopefully arrive next week. I also did some research into the MIDI standard to begin preparing for how to utilize it in our software implementation.
So far our progress is largely ahead of schedule, although I am somewhat concerned about the status of the video display. This week I intend to devote some extra time to finalizing a backup plan for the display in the event that the Jetson cannot run our software fast enough. I am also somewhat worried that the process of interfacing 5V microcontrollers with a 3.3V microcontroller may be more complicated than we’ve currently planned for, so I will be doing some tests at home to verify this.
By the end of next week I intend to have completed an initial design for our sensor-to-MIDI mapping and to have finished my research on the MIDI protocol. If the Arduino Due arrives in time I plan to attempt to set it up to act as MIDI device and get basic MIDI signal generation working. If not I will devote my extra time to designing the overlay GUI for our video display.