Need help with wireless Bluetooth low energy MIDI

[John]

I'm a wireless novice, but have electronics experience.

I'm looking to add bluetooth low energy communication from a battery powered MIDI controller to a Macbook Air (or other BTLE compliant laptop). The device will always be less than 10 feet from the laptop.

Has anybody worked on this using Nordic parts (maybe nRF8001 starter kit)?
I'm unclear on how to package the data on the transmit end, and how to translate the data to something usable by audio software (MIDI input) on the receive end.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[TIE Fighter]

Hi,

My suggestion would be to test using a MIDI shield and the nRF8001 shield with an Arduino. MIDI Event messages can be received using the UART TX and RX pins of the Arduino and then sent over the nRF8001 to the BTLE compliant laptop.

The nRF8001 shields are available here www.seeedstudio.com/.../bluetooth-40-low-energy-ble-shield-v20-p-1631.html www.makershed.com/.../mkrbl1.htm

There are quite a few MIDI shields available, a web search will show you a list.

Thanks Note: I am not a MIDI expert

[John]

Thanks TF. I have a redbear shield from Makershed, and am able to easily connect to my iPhone (iOS). I am still unable, however, to connect to a Macbook Air (OSX).

If anyone has example xcode for recognizing and connecting to OSX, it would be very helpful.

As a workaround, I'm currently using a blufruit bluetooth module, which was super easy to integrate. It's power consumption is way too high, though.

Just brainstorming, but it would probably make sense for me to research communicating between two BTLE modules, and then use a micro to talk to OSX via USB. Code examples on how to chat between two modules (master/slave) would be very helpful, as well.

Thanks.

[TIE Fighter]

Can you use the lightblue application that is available for OS X to check if it can see your shield, I assume you have checked that your Macbook air supports Bluetooth 4.0. OS X natively supports Bluetooth low energy and the same APIs as iOS are available.

An example application for OS X is here

You can use the Bluetooth low energy SDK for Arduino in devzone.nordicsemi.com/arduino , temperature/thermometer example to be used with the shield.