Hi ebai101 , is your latest post the best way you have found to get midi input on Bela? Do you think this is still low latency?
Bela Mini: MIDI input on UART0?
Rich_Sewell Yes - forgot to post the code. Here it is: https://github.com/ebai101/BelaSerialMidi
I'll add an example render.cpp real quick.
Great, thanks so much.
a year later
Just to confirm it works perfectly with SuperCollider. I use ttyMIDI from ebai101 with a small modification. I changed line 151 in ttymidi.c to:
if ((status = snd_rawmidi_open(NULL, & midiout, "virtual", 0)) < 0) {
thanks for reporting back. I came across this recently and I wondered whether it would be be a better option ... https://alsa.opensrc.org/Serial
or maybe this is better https://github.com/ChikaraWakaura/snd-serialmidi . It seems to build and load ...
I've tested the snd-serial midi kernel module, but unfortunately the midi packets got scrambled. I know it would be elegant to have the same solution for C++, Pd and SuperCollider, but I think it's better to use two solutions.
C++: Don't use ALSA at all. Use BelaSerialMIDI from ebai101 or make a SerialMIDI subclass from the Bela Serial class and implement some basic midi parsing for the callback functions.
PD, Supercollider: Use the Virtual RawMidi interface from ALSA with ttyMIDI and maybe implement it as a kernel module.
thanks for the feedback. I guess one could have a C++ daemon reading from serial and writing to virmidi ...
a year later
- Edited
Hey everyone, this is exactly the thread I've been looking for!
I'd greatly appreciate your help in making this work for me:
I tried to set up UART4 as described here,
but it doesn't seem to work by just adding the line (_addr4=/...) in uEnv.
So right now my uEnv.txt looks like this:
[...]
uboot_overlay_addr2=/lib/firmware/BB-BELA-00A1.dtbo
uboot_overlay_addr3=/lib/firmware/BB-BELA-CTAG-SPI-00A0.dtbo
uboot_overlay_addr4=/lib/firmware/BB-UART4-00A0.dtbo
console=ttyS0,115200n8
uname_r=4.14.108-ti-xenomai-r143
mmcid=0 So I tried to configure UART with config-pin but couldn't load the cape-unversala -overlay without rendering the Board unbootable..
Now config-pin -q p9.11and config-pin -q p9.13 each outputs:
P9_11 pinmux file not found! # P9_13 respecitvely
Pin has no cape: P9_11Thanks in advance, also for the great work on ttymidi for Bela 
The use of the BB-UART4 overlay is alternative to the use of cape universala. This should mean that with this overlay loaded the relevant pins of UART4 should already be enabled without need to use config-pin. Try using the UART4 peripheral to verify that
OMG yes! Thank you so much
I was looking in all the wrong places, but your answer helped me shift my focus to the actual problem:
It wasn't really a problem with the serial connection as I had assumed but with the ttymidi.service..
I had used @ebai101 's build.sh script before. Compiling manually did the Trick!