Remote Control surface for MBSID via MBNET?

MIDIbox SID
1

Hi Folks

Quite a long time since I did any serious electronics for myself; the outside world got a bit ‘messy’. It’s good to be back getting on with my own stuff.

I’ve just done the final assembly work for my MB6582, (which must give me the ‘wooden spoon’ prize for slowest build from the Wilba’s original board bulk buy), and been doing some thinking.

I’d like to build another one for live use, with bigger, more solid control, and preferably putting the actual SID part of the unit in a 19" rack module, and having a thin, but more solid control surface near my keyboards. I bought a seond base PCB for just this reason.

What I would like to ask the programmers amongst us is this: if I put another PIC in the control surface, and used ‘proper’ CAN bus tranceiver chips to get the longer cable run, could I still control the four PICs in the base unit, or would I have to sacrifice one channel pair, leaving the PIC in the control surface as a ‘dummy’?

Apologies in advance here - I may have asked this before, a long time ago, but can’t remember when and where.

2

Hi again! :slight_smile:

I remember that in the RC38 release I made sure that all SID engines can be controlled from another MBNET master. I tested this with a STM32 and LPC17 core, but it would also be possible with a PIC based core of course - and this would be the recommended solution from my side, because the MIOS32 based MBSID has no control surface yet :wink:

It’s important that the second MIDIbox gets a device ID which is dividable by 4, and which is not 0. So, valid IDs are 4, 8, 12, …

And the firmware needs a small change, so that this MBNET master accesses slave 0/1/2/3 instead of “own ID”+0..3 - thats all.

I will add this option to the next release, because I can easily test this with my two full-blown MBSIDs :slight_smile:

Btw.: in order to get a robust connection between the two devices, you should consider to use CAN transceivers at both ends!

Best Regards, Thorsten.

3

Wow. Thanks Thorsten, that is fantastic.

I’ll get on with the the CAN bus interfaces, since hardware is more of my bag anyway.