A modern reinvention of the MIDI router by Conductive Labs
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Hi Everyone,
A quick update… we’re in the serious sausage making time of the project so these updates might be slightly less exciting but we thought you guys might be interested in how we have been spending our time.
Darryl is hard at work creating the new PCBs with all the processor and display related components going down on the main board, and adding various signal noise filtering and ESD components too. First board to go to the PCB vendor for samples will be the new version of the Remote board. It will let us test the Z-heights and the enclosure fit without waiting for the main board to be completed. Always thinking about how to accelerate the schedule.
We have a few minor UI updates/changes from the prototype version. 1st goal was to give some extra room to plug/unplug the MIDI jacks. 2nd goal is to make the navigation area more user friendly: Encoder, Buttons and the OLED screen. We added a Shift button and Ext button for more flexibility and less menu diving! The Ext button is used when configuring the ports on the secondary “Remote” external box. See the attached WIP (work in progress) UI layout. Nick is doing the final UI design that includes all the specific jack placements that informs Darryl the exact locations on the PCB. And will ultimately be the artwork for the silk screens.
We added a serious hard core software engineer, Blake, to the team on a part time basis to help Steve with the more esoteric coding. He’ll be doing some 3rd party library clean up too. We are focused on efficient code practices to make sure the MIDI routing throughput is maximized. Together, Steve and Blake have completely revamped the software architecture and its looking really clean. Now we can get to the more fun stuff.
‘Til next time, Happy Holidays and New Year!
Darryl & Steve
Welcome to 2020; self driving cars, spaceships that land on earth, and MIDI routers with real buttons! Everything we could have dreamed of in the 2000's! ;-)
Happy New Year and all the best to you and yours. We really appreciate your support of our endeavor to make the MIDI router of your dreams.
Steve and Darryl ❤
It is good to have smart friends!
First, we met with Paul who is our circuit design and PCB layout mentor. He's got 30 years experience working on electronic musical instruments, primarily as lead design engineer for commercial scale electronic pipe organs. We were having an issue with the USB hub controller not consistently starting on one of the prototype boards. Turned out we were missing a critical capacitor on the 1.8V power output from the integrated regulator. That was the last thing we needed to understand before starting the next PCB layout!
Another big development is, after some more prototyping, we are seriously considering a move to an even faster MCU. Not because its necessary for MRCC, but because we need it for future projects so we might as well start now. It's the fastest MCU on the market, 600MHz, way overkill for MIDI routing and effects but also very low power and great feature set. It's a little cheaper than the current one as well, amazing. The challenge will be the high pin count, fine pitch BGA (Ball Grid Array) routing on the PCB. Paul has offered to help with this, he's got the experience with BGA layout.
Last night we met with Ben and Nick. Ben is a veteran mechanical engineer (and just got his EE degree as well), and Nick is an award winning industrial designer and user interface expert. Ben did The NDLR enclosure drawings, and Nick did the faceplate graphics design for The NDLR and now the MRCC. We had a great brainstorming session on the enclosure design. We are now leaning towards using an extruded aluminum enclosure. Ben will send us some sample drawings to help us decide. The enclosure will support rack ears so we can make it work for desktop and rack.
We'll share that enclosure design as soon as we can!
All the best,
Steve and Darryl
We would like to formally thank you all for your amazing support of the MRCC project! We’ve said it many times, but we like to make what we need, and we are so happy so many feel it to be useful too.
We have a lot of hard work to do to make this thing a reality, and we’ll bring you all along on the journey.
Thank you!
Steve and Darryl