MIDI to general-purpose serial interface

This is probably not the right place to post this, but I couldn't find a better one.

I've been looking into the feasibility of using the Micro-8's MIDI IN/OUT ports as a general-purpose serial interface in order to make the Micro-8 more connected, especially over the Internet.

This shouldn't be too hard as MIDI ports are already serial interfaces.

I think this could open up quite a few interesting possibilities.

After doing some research, it seems that using an ESP8266 together with an adapter like this:

es.aliexpress.com/item/1005004137304668.html

and, in my case, running the Zimodem firmware:

github.com/bozimmerman/Zimodem

could make some pretty interesting projects possible.

That said, I noticed in the Micro-8 manual that while it's possible to send arbitrary data through the MIDI port using the midiSend() instruction, receiving data is a completely different story.

As far as I can tell, the only available function is midiUpdt(), which is limited to processing MIDI events.

Ideally, there would be something like a midiReceive() function that could receive arbitrary incoming bytes and store them into a user-provided buffer.

I don't know whether something like this would be feasible for the Micro-8.

Any thoughts?

This is certainly possible. Although MIDI is relatively slow.

Also it 'might' be possible to use the USART TX/RX as they are available on the ISP connector but they have pull-ups for MIDI so I don't know if an external chip would read the signals correctly. For that I would have to expose the USART as Lofi commands. Very low priority at the moment.