UART test

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uze6666
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Re: UART test

Post by uze6666 »

Using Uze's latest Uzesynth, I can send MIDI data to it using ttymidi and qtractor. Fantastic!
Great!! :D
It doesn't look like Uze has committed his latest Uzesynth update to the Uzebox repo yet, which makes me think he might still be tweaking it?
Yes, it's just been hacked to work. More on that in the point below.
Now we need to extend Uzesynth so that it can load patch data off SD card and it needs a way to transfer new patch data onto the Uzebox via UART. I presume this is entirely possible but not at the same time as the UART is being used for MIDI, obviously. Currently, the user has to rebuild and reflash Uzesynth every time they want to change their patches which is not a nice workflow!
Couple thoughts on this. The current kernel (including the MIDI player subset) requires patches in FLASH. So even loading them via SD or via UART, you could not play them directly by the engine. It could make sense to re-introduce those "RAM patches" that were removed a long time ago, but perhaps just for the MIDI engine. Also, since games typically don't use the MIDI code (and RAM patches), I think it should be refactored out in it's own project. MusicDemo was just that, a music engine demo. So I would be more inclined to create a new "Uzesynth" project dedicated to a proper music instrument. Finally, as for the patch transfer part, I think using MIDI sysex message could be a good option. It's pretty standard but allows to send arbitrary info to a MIDI device from DAWs.
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danboid
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Re: UART test

Post by danboid »

I had no idea that the patch data could only live in flash memory and not be altered after. That is quite the showstopper for my hope of quickly previewing patches without flashing or reboots so hopefully its not a large amount of work to implement RAM patch support.

Yes I was aware of sysex and was thinking that might make more sense although I've never really used it myself, not having much MIDI hardware.
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uze6666
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Re: UART test

Post by uze6666 »

had no idea that the patch data could only live in flash memory and not be altered after.
Yeah, RAM is a precious commodity on the Uzebox. Pretty much anything we can put in flash we put it. Perhaps you could start another thread if not already done in the Software forum to discuss this new synth project.
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danboid
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Re: UART test

Post by danboid »

I started a music production thread here:

https://uzebox.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11209

It seems you haven't commited your fixes for Uzesynth to the Uzebox repo to get UART MIDI working yet?
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uze6666
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Re: UART test

Post by uze6666 »

Didn't have time to work on that last week. Hopefully, I can find some time this week to wrap this up.
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