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Moving from DIN to USB MIDI connector - FTDI Chip is enough?

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Matteo DC
Posts: 2
New Member
Topic starter
 

Dear all,

I am building an FPGA-based Synth with a DIN MIDI input connenctor. So far I developed the DDS, mixer and MIDI serial interface. I am preparing a V2 of the synth and I would like to use a USB port instead of the DIN connector. This because all the main portable keyboards use USB. I dont want to increase the complexity of the design and I was wondering if I could use a simple FTDI USBtoUART converter in order to get the raw MIDI data. Do you think If I use one of the chip showed here http://www.ftdichip.com/USB.html, will a get the MIDI data straight away?

Thank you in advance,
regards,
matteo

 
Posted : 06/07/2017 11:34 am
Clemens Ladisch
Posts: 321
Reputable Member
 

The USB MIDI protocol is not compatible with the USB serial protocol implemented by any of these chips.

You have to do some programming to implement the USB MIDI device on a microcontroller. There are boards like the Teensy that have libraries that help with this.
See Implementing a class-compliant USB MIDI device.

 
Posted : 07/07/2017 12:41 am
Matteo DC
Posts: 2
New Member
Topic starter
 

Dear Clemens, thank you very much for you reply. The post you liked is exactly what I was looking for. I was hoping I could use the FTDI chip since my synth is FPGA based and this would have allowed me to directly take the serial data. After reading your post, I am considering leaving some room on the PCB for the Teensy. His role will be just to interface with he external midi controller.

 
Posted : 09/07/2017 2:39 am
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