third entry: (this is supposed to be the stupid pic trick entry but sadly, very sadly could not be)
Well I got serial to work on the PIC which is great because it makes you feel like this 40 year old microcontroller technology is actualy cutting edge because it is making little words appear on a real computer, which we all know is the deffinition of hi-tech. I was determined to get midi out of the PIC, and so I tried and tried again. I talked to a number of other people who tried to do midi out on the PIC and no one in our class had had any success. So I tried again and again and while something was being transmitted it wasn't what I was sending. I talked to Carlos who got midi working after a strugle but it sounded like it was black magic and he couldn't help. Jeff got it working but his code was a bit different and he used a 20 mhz crystal I should try that. Greg also got it working but he wrote it in C, maybe I should learn C? I looked in the manual and noticed that for serout2 there is a define character_spacing which tells the serout how much time it should put between things. I think that this is worth a try yet I have no time to try it now since I have to come up with another stupid pic tric quic. People have had a lot of trouble with serout2. I also ordered some hex inverters to try midi that way. I wouldn't be such a stickler for midi if but I want to do a lot of midi projects.
I also have not come up with a group or an idea for a final project, unfortunately I know that I am a last minute person and hope that things will come together as they always seem to do. I do like listening to marching band music so...
Jimmy and I seem to have a lot of things in common, maybe we could work together? I looked at the robot builder's bonanza and it seems pretty cool, i think that I want to build a bunch of the sound curcuits that are in there. Especially the tone generaters using the 555 chip and the tone recognition using the 567 chip look particularly interesting.
I will get my trick by next week.