blinking LED to MIDI clock?

Design Concepts
1

Hey,

I’ve got a Casio DM-100 Keyboard which I circuit bent some time ago.

The sound of it is great but since there’s no MIDI, I have no way of syncronizing it with other Gear, which I’d really like to do. It has a blinking “Tempo LED”, though.

So I thought it might be possible to convert the LED’s steady pulse to a MIDI clock signal somehow. maybe with a Display showing the current BPM.

I guess doing this wouldn’t be very hard for someone who knows how to code, but I don’t. Does anyone know if this has been done before? If so, please tell me. I’ve searched the archives but didn’t find anything that exactly matches my needs. But perhaps I’ve used the wrong words for my search, so please be gentle if I asked a very common question.

any help will be greatly appreciated,

cheers, der Warst

2

Hallo Herr Warst,

There’s an C-based example called ClockBox available from the download section. This should contain everything to get you started. You just have to connect that LED to some input pin of the PIC and find out how fast it’s blinking (which may not be that trivial as it’s sounding :slight_smile: ) Although I’m pretty sure there is something like a tap for beat-detection is out there and I guess this is what you need.

ClockBox has an internal Meter, is setable to BPM values and outputs a MIDI-Clock signal (which is nothing else than 96 ticks per beat, btw).

Hope this info gets you started!

Best Regards,

AC