super-disco

Inspired by Look Mum No Computer's Super Simple MIDI Keyboard project, this is my Not So Super Simple MIDI Keyboard. Rather than an Arduino, it uses a Raspberry PI Pico running MicroPython and Adafruit NeoPixel arcade buttons rather than plain illuminated ones. At some point, I might even get round to sticking an OLED screen in there to add the ability to change settings on the fly.

Checking MIDI messages without connecting to a MIDI enabled device

You can still check that the MIDI messages are being sent on the configured UART pin, by looping that back into one of the other UART RX pins. For example, import the UART class and configure one of the RX pins on UART 1:

from machine import Pin, UART

uart_rx = UART(1, UART_BAUD, rx=Pin(5, Pin.IN))

Then it's just a matter of reading anything that's sent and decoding it. For example, add this to the bottom of the infinite while loop:

    message = uart_rx.read(3)
    while message:
        print("Received: {} : {}".format("note_on" if message[0] == 0x90 else "note_off", message[1]))
        message = uart_rx.read(3)

This should output something along the lines of:

Received: note_on : 61
Received: note_off : 61

While I'm sure we could do this a better way, this should at least let you see that the messages contains the correct note.