Pic Programming and Hair Pulling

On Monday and Tuesday night, I swallowed up my "free" time with PIC programming in the PComp lab. Still working off of my weekend "high" with starting the MIDI circuit, I wanted to see how much I could finish before the week's end. Of course, this being my first time having to create a MIDI circuit and then program it (on a PIC no less!), I was sure that at some stage in the game, I would encounter some serious problems. Well, luckily, those said problems happened to happen on Monday and Tuesday night, weeks before I would need to hand in any sort of final product. While I carefully crafted my circuit and scrutinized the notes on programming the PIC for MIDI out, I must have overlooked the section on changing my configurations from "XT" to "HS" in the epic programmer window. I was careful about making sure I had a 20Mhz oscillator, and used "Hserout" in the programming code (instead of serout), but I know by now, after almost three years in this program, that there will be at least SOMETHING wrong, SOMEWHERE (I definitely can say that being at ITP for this long has sharpened my debugging and troubleshooting skills).

Thus, I was able to have my circuit working in the sense that my PIC can take in 5 input switches, and send out MIDI data serially to the MAC, as well as turn on 5 lights on corresponding output pins (to indicate that it is indeed sending something). However, after speaking with Luke Dubois, my Live Image Processing teacher, on Wednesday, I came to discover that, while there is MIDI information transmitting to the Mac, the signals aren't totally consistent, and I have to message some things to make sure that it sends a steady stream, instead of a sometimes interrupted one.

So, at this point, I guess I know what I will spend my weekend doing!