USB MIDI support baked in (experimental)

[clevelandmusicco]

There have been a few requests for MIDI support in the past, but not an overwhelming number. And it was once on my backlog to add a TRS MIDI jack to the Hothouse hardware itself, but the universe threw all sorts of spanners in the works.

Now I just want to mention that I've baked MIDI over USB support into the experimental/midi-cc-baked-in feature branch for anyone who is interested in checking it out.

At the moment, some opinionated MIDI CC support is implemented in Hothouse and the only example effect that uses it in this branch is LibreVerb.

If you want to try it out, put the seed in DFU mode and do the usual:

git pull
git checkout experimental/midi-cc-baked-in
cd src/LibreVerb
make clean; make; make program-dfu

By default, the MIDI channel is OMNI, but there are several ways to override that; read on ...

The Real Ask

I guess this more a Request For Comment than anything else. So, please take a look at the basic design as documented in src/MIDI.md. I think it handles most situations I can think of. But the community is the real judge of that.

So, if you're at all interested, comments/complaints/concerns are always welcome. If all goes well, I will merge this to main for everyone to access and hoist the feature into many more of the examples.

Worth mentioning

I'm also working on a fully-open source controller with MIDI source/host capabilities, programmable via a simple web UI. It features off-the-shelf components and is Pico 2/RP2350-based. (I culled a lot of the code/design while collaborating on this project, after the EchoKing example from this repo was ported there.) So, you'll be able to build yourself a 4-stomp, 8 bank controller for peanuts and control your Hothouse, Funbox, Terrarium, Linus' GuitarPedal, your TONEX ONE, or any other USB MIDI-enabled pedal without a dedicated utility box.

Cheers and be well!
Ricky
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