The Dual Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered ProtoZOA Offers a Quick Start for MIDI 2.0 Experimentation
Building atop tinyUSB, this dual-RP2040 development platform is available free-of-charge with permissive source to MIDI Association members.
MIDI specialist AmeNote has announced a prototyping board designed for those looking to build around the new MIDI 2.0 standard: the ProtoZOA, powered by no fewer than two Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller boards — and one unit is available to all MIDI Association members free of charge.
"Our plan is to release most of the ProtoZOA source code as Open Source with a permissive license," explains AmeNote co-founder Mike Kent, who chairs the MIDI 2.0 Working Group at the MIDI Association. "That will allow even non-MIDI Association members to use the code to develop MIDI 2.0 products."
MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, was introduced in a paper by Sequential Circuits' Dave Smith and Chet Wood in October 1981. Designed to cut through the proprietary mess of the electronic synthesizer market, MIDI offered a route for cross-vendor intercommunication — and has since become the go-to standard.
It's a standard based on 40-year-old technology, however, and the MIDI Association believes it's due an update: MIDI 2.0. Teased in January 2019 and introduced at the Winter NAMM Show in early 2020, MIDI 2.0 offers a range of improvements over its predecessor including bidirectional communication, a new packet format for high-speed transports, a specification for capability queries, and support for wired and wireless media — while maintaining backwards compatibility with traditional MIDI equipment and software.
Right now, though, the MIDI Association is working to encourage developers make the jump to the new standard — which is where AmeNote's ProtoZOA comes in. A custom development board powered by two Raspberry Pi Pico boards with RP2040 microcontrollers, brought to our attention by Adafruit, the ProtoZOA implements MIDI 2.0 including the capability discovery features, USB connectivity, the new universal packet format, MIDI 1.0 to 2.0 translation with MIDI 1.0 input and output ports, and includes expansion capabilities for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless MIDI, SPI, and UART connectivity, plus an optional LCD panel.
Based on the tinyUSB stack, the ProtoZOA uses one Raspberry Pi Pico as the primary driving device and the other as a PicoProbe-based debugging tool — allowing developers to experiment with MIDI 2.0 at the lowest levels. The source code, meanwhile, is being made available permissively-licensed — so anyone can take it and use it as a base to develop their own MIDI 2.0-compliant devices.
"AmeNote chose not to keep our leading expertise the USB MIDI 2.0 technology to ourselves as a competitive advantage," the company explains, "but we decided to share that with other developers, including our potential competitors, to help kick start MIDI 2.0 products coming to market."
There's only one catch: the board is currently available exclusively to members of the MIDI Association and/or the Association of Musical Electronics Industry (AMEI). Members can apply to receive a single ProtoZOA free of charge, along with all source code, while additional boards are priced at $250 each. AmeNote has confirmed it plans to make the ProtZOA available to the general public in the fourth quarter of 2022, but states that the price is yet to be determined.
More information is available on the AmeNote website.