Arduino IDE and Projects
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Arduino improves the compilation terms for the free plan in the online IDE | Arduino Blog
Online interactive development environments (IDE) have taken off during the recent years. Traditionally, local IDEs were considered the best tools for programming as they were usually faster than their online counterparts. But the arrival of new web programming frameworks and the standardisation of high-speed internet connections have improved the user experience of interactive editors using browsers.
Arduino’s popular online IDE is a widely used tool for programming not only Arduino boards but also 3rd party hardware. Improving the user’s experience including or changing features is part of its dynamic nature, always based on the developers’ experience and feedback.
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Convert an old telephone into a MIDI instrument | Arduino Blog
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a fantastic standard because it is versatile enough to encompass almost all instruments, but simple enough to work with using low-power digital hardware. A typical MIDI message contains three bytes. The first is a status byte that describes the action (like “note on”) and the channel to use, the second byte contains the note to play, and the third byte defines the velocity. Because a single switch can act as a trigger to send a MIDI message, one can turn an old touch tone telephone into a MIDI instrument.
The phone used in this project and most others like it have numeric keypads set up in the same way as keyboards, with a matrix reducing the number of I/O pins needed on a connected microcontroller. Multiply the number or rows in the matrix by the number of columns to get the maximum number of keys. This particular keypad had a combined row/column total of 11, which means it could support up to 30 unique keys. But only 12 of those are connected, so the tutorial includes instructions on how to identify the key that each row/column combo triggers. Once you know that information, you can connect the row and column wires to the I/O pins of an Arduino.