Last year, I designed my first Gadgeteer module. I didn't have a board designed, but went through all the same steps. I recently designed a MIDI module primarily for use with the .NET Gadgeteer, but also for use with any 3.3v to 5v microcontroller with a serial port. Existing MIDI boards all assumed a 5v signal level from the MCU. Most modern MCUs are 3.3v or even less.

Having tried those 3.3v signals with MIDI equipment, I can tell you the results were spotty at best. Some equipment was ok with it, some was not. MIDI is a very old standard with poorly defined specs. Rather than define minimum/maximum levels, they've simply provided a reference schematic.

Update 3/15/2012: A video of the module in action (the first produced module, not the kit-friendly module) can be seen on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNeQ14DQbF0

What follows shows several different iterations of the board design. The end goal was to stay under 5cm by 5cm in order to keep cost down, and to make it suitably for hand assembly. I also designed it from the start to be Open Source Hardware and Open Source Software. I used the free version of Eagle PCB to do the schematic and board layout.

The first version turned out to be too wide. Being larger than 5cm bumped it into the next price range which is 150% the cost of the 5cm price range. I decided that two mounting holes would be enough as long as the MIDI connectors were well-soldered. Given the number of solder pads they have, I figured they'd be ok. (For the most recent version, I increased the size of the strain-relief solder pads anyway.)

This next version is the first one I had manufactured. I created my own MIDI connector footprint as the ones I was using were simply too busy.

Here are the boards from Seeed. I ordered 20 of them.

My first board is also the first surface mount soldering I ever did. Some of those parts are smaller than through hole solder pads. Way too much flux on here, but at least the parts on working :)

That board was ok except for one very important detail: the footprint for the 6n138 opto-isolator was incorrect. It's way too small on the board, and there is no 6n138 in that size package. In order to keep prototyping I ended up having to do some ugly soldering to get the isolator on to that footprint. I'm glad Seeed charged very little for these boards.

The one with the silicone on it was made for a friend in Seattle. It has to survive shipping and handling. There's no way it would have made it there intact if I didn't reinforce it somehow. Here's mine, working on my dev board. I didn't clean any of the flux off mine, as you can tell from this picture.

That version also used tiny SMD components. Those were ok for me to solder, but many people shy away from surface mount for hand soldering. I know I did until I tried it out.

The board has four of those tiny resistors (marked 2200). As far as surface mount goes, those are actually pretty huge. There's also a surface mount diode, the opto-isolator and the Gadgeteer connector. The board also has one surface mount 5 pin logic gate which I use to convert 3.3v to 5v as required by MIDI. That's the one surface mount ic that made it into the final version, as there's no suitably small replacement component. The only other surface mount bit that made it through is the Gadgeteer connector. You can get those in through hole, but the surface mount version actually seems a little easier to work with.

This first run also had one other flaw: the signal to the MCU is pulled up to 5v. That works fine on the FEZ Spider (my test board) and the Netduino and other 5v tolerant boards, but not with the FEZ Hydra and others. In any case, the Gadgeteer spec only requires pins be 3.6v tolerant, so I had to change the pull-up.

For the next version I decided to try out more through hole construction. This will be much easier to provide to people as a kit. I may pre-solder the logic gate and the gadgeteer connector, but everything else is standard through-hole construction. The board is slightly larger than the SMD version, but is still pretty small. I also increased the size of the solder pads on the MIDI connectors to make sure they weren't going anywhere.

I added the additional pin for the 3.3v reference supply for the 6n138. If you want only 5v signals coming and going, and you're not using Gadgeteer, you can actually plug 5v into both 5v and 3.3v "Alt MCU IO" pins.

For anyone who wants to get these fabricated themselves, under the Open Source Hardware license, the current schematic and board design files attached. For anyone else, I'll very likely end up selling kits of this board in the near future. Expect an announcement when that happens.

Also, here are the parts this is designed to use:

Please keep in mind I haven't yet assembled one from this round (they'll arrive in around two weeks). Depending on the processor you work with and the voltage levels, the value for R2 (the pull-up) may need to be adjusted. 220 is typical, but I've seen it at 470 and even as high as 10K. Current size works fine with the FEZ Spider board. I'll test with other main boards once I get the new PCBs in.

I'm working on the driver and have an early version of it completed. It's not up in source control yet as I need to figure out if I'm going to host it as part of the Gadgeteer CodePlex source or something else. I plan to cross-compile this to Netduino as well. If you're getting your own version of this fabbed and need access to the WIP driver code, just drop me a line.

You can see the full development of this board and driver, including all the great help I got by developing this in the open, in this thread at TinyCLR.com.

I have a number of other modules in mind. This stuff is fun :)