Check out your MIDI home studio with this transmitter-receiver pair

The author is an enthusiastic user of the kind of music technology that employs the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) protocol to communicate between keyboards, sound modules and computers in order to create and record sounds and music.

When originally starting to use this type of equipment, the author often found that the system did not work the first time. Lack of experience made it unclear whether something was faulty, devices were connected up wrongly, or simply that a particular setting had not been chosen correctly. What was needed was a simple device that would transmit and detect single messages in a way that clearly demonstrated the presence or absence of meaningful code signals. The result is this project, which is a great improvement over basically having to guess at what might be happening from the flood of data that an oscilloscope will show to be streaming constantly from the keyboard, even when no-one is touching it!