MIDI Connections

by Bill Earl
With a few jumper connections, the board will boot up in MIDI mode that will read 'classic' 31250Kbaud MIDI data on a UART pin and act like a synth/drum machine - there are dozens of built-in drum and sample effects.

Prepare the breadboard

Place the VS1053 breakout on the breadboard. Center it so that there is one row of holes on each side.

Add the breakout friendly headphone jack and wire power and ground jumpers as shown.

  • VCC -> 5v
  • GND -> GND

Configure for MIDI operation

Add jumpers as follows:
  • GPIO-0 -> GND
  • GPIO-1 -> 3.3v
  • Rx -> Arduino Digital #2
  • RST -> Arduino Digital #9

Connect the Headphone Jack

Same as the earlier tests, add jumpers for:
  • AGND (v2) or GBUF (v1) -> Center Pin
  • LOUT -> Left Pin
  • ROUT -> Right Pin

Midi Example Sketch

Connect the Arduino to your computer with a USB cable and plug your headphones into the headphone jack. Select File->Examples->Adafruit_VS1053_Codec->player_miditest to load the example code for MIDI operation.. You should hear a repeating series of ascending tones from the MIDI player.
AUDIO CONNECTIONS GPIO
This guide was first published on Jul 30, 2013. It was last updated on Jul 30, 2013. This page (MIDI Connections) was last updated on Oct 21, 2019.