First time Stamp/PIC user-need advice for Stamp selection & hardware for Midi A

Tony C

I want to make a midi analyzer that will record sysex streams, display the data on an LCD, let the user scroll through the data, and give the user
the option to dump the sysex stream to a PC- over midi. (Midi should be easier & cheaper than RS232 & USB, but not faster)

I've been looking at the posts of Midi/Stamp projects and various web pages, but haven't seen anything like my project.

I'd rather user a Stamp than a raw PIC, because I don't want to learn assembly- again
(Since Basic is much slower and less efficient than assembly, are the instruction cycles still fast enough to handle midi streams?)

I would suspect I would need a stamp with large amounts of program memory, because being new to this it's likely my code won't be efficient, as well as my wanting to add a lot of features.

1. I need help selecting a stamp that is fast enough.

2. I've got a programming background, but not with hardware. I could use some general direction as to how to get a stamp to record a midi sysex stream,
and save it into a buffer (about 1MB).


thanks

Post Edited (Tony C) : 8/16/2007 6:51:22 AM GMT

Mike Green

I think you need to consider a Propeller rather than a Stamp. The newer Stamps like the BS2px are fairly fast, but still take tens of microseconds to do even simple operations. The biggest limitation is that of memory. All the Stamps have only 26 bytes of variables available. There are tricks you can play, but there's really limited variable memory.

The Propeller has Spin which is a much faster interpretive language and there are 8 processors. You probably don't need that many to do your project, but even two will let you overlap the serial I/O with the other functions which the Stamps can't give you. The Propeller also has more memory (but not 1MB). You could just hook up an SD card to the Propeller and read and write PC compatible files. The Propeller can do VGA video and PS/2 keyboards which would let you do a nice user interface.

There are some existing MIDI input routines in the Propeller Object Exchange. see if they'll do part of what you want.

pwillard

Sounds like a job for SX/B maybe?

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There's nothing like a new idea and a warm soldering iron.