Daisy Field: are there unused GPIO outputs available?

Electrosmith Products Daisy Field
1

Hi all,

I’m not much of a hardware person and I’m trying to understand these reference documents to know if any of the GPIO pins on the microcontroller in the daisy field are unused by the field.

I’m working on a solenoid trigger system and would love to use the field for that, it’s got the perfect set of interface controls for the project I’m working on, but if I’m reading this correctly, I think all the GPIO pins are being used?

I’m comparing it to the reference for the daisy pod: I think the pins with labels like N$15 and N$17 are unused by the pod. Since I don’t see any labels like that on the field reference, I think that means there are none available.

Here is the pod reference document:

Can anyone tell me if I’m reading that correctly?

Thank you!

2

You’re right, just looking at the shematic for field, there are no pins without assigned net names. Therefore no free GPIO’s.

Usually in a schematic, you find unconnected pins marked with an X. X is not in the parts library, you have to make it or import it.

here’s one I edited, showing the seed on a Daisy Pod.

image
image1685×1104 16.1 KB

But anyway,
maybe use TRS midi to some obtainable MCU like the RPI pico to activate the solenoids - if that’s fast enough ?

Adafruit did a project with a Feather M4 (using USB midi). That board is currently unavailable it seems. MIDI Solenoid Drum Kit - YouTube

And I found this, should be plug-n-play if you use a TRS->DIN MIDI adapter cable.

Open source software + hw design files available (PIC16F1825 based).

Teensy 2, 40 output channels.

SM32F103C8T6, 30 servo outputs.

2 Likes
3

I have a field and have been wondering this too but not done any experiments yet but…
It should be possible to get some kind of SPI or I2C chip that does GPIO and piggyback it off of the respective bus pins?

1 Like