DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

I'm helping Hans with shift brite based project for a musician. He gave me a ring of Shift Brite LEDs with an arduino attached. Normally I prefer to work in vim and using makefiles instead of using an IDE. The Arduino software 0017 shipped with a makefile that gives instructions about how to modify it to work for your project but that still doesn't work.

While I'm not happy using proprietary software for making PCBs, I have yet to find an adequate FLOSS solution for creating PCBs. But once I have created the PCB, I use The GIMP, which is free software, to layout my PCBs on a page to print, so I can actually transfer them to Copper and etch them.

A few months ago Emily, the woman I have been dating for a while, bought an Oberheim DX drum machine. She actually got it from another dork bot member here, Hans. Anyways, this drum machine stores its sounds on eeproms. It is made so that you can replace these eeproms to get different sounds, and some people have installed ZIF sockets to make them really easily replaceable. Emily talked about wanting to be able to put her own sounds into the drum machine.. and I thought that it wouldn't be so hard.

I grabbed two of those 36 key keypad boards from Paul at the last dork bot, he grabbed them out of those POS boxes [with the big LCDs that he has posted info about]. I wanted to get them working with the Benito and also wanted work with i2c a little [as I have a bunch of these 8bit i2c i/o expanders]. The keypad has 20 i/o pins so the Benito cannot use it directly anyways.. though 12 bits of shift registering would probably be better... but either way, I wanted to use what I had + i2c.

I've posted some of the code I've been using for midi on an avr chip [atmega16]. It should work on other avr chips with little or no modification. I'd love it if others would test it out and and contribute.

I've included a little bit of info and some example code here: http://x37v.info/projects/microcontroller/avr-midi/