MIDI Shield Hookup Guide
Byron J. 
Introduction
The Sparkfun MIDI Shield allows you to add MIDI ports to your R3-compatible Arduino board.
The shield provides the standard MIDI port circuits, including 5-pin DIN connectors and an opto-isolated MIDI input. The shield also has some extra input and output devices. It had LEDs on D6 and D7, pushbuttons on D2, D3 and D4, and rotary potentiometers on A0 and A1.
The V1.5 revision also adds several configurable features, such as converting the MIDI output to a MIDI thru, and the option to use a software serial port for MIDI, leaving the hardware serial for programming and debugging. It also buffers the output, making it compatible with the Arduino Pro without needing to circumvent the protection resistors on the serial TX and RX lines.
This guide will show you how to put the shield together, then explore several example projects, demonstrating how you can apply MIDI to your projects.
Suggested Reading
- If you're new to MIDI, our MIDI Tutorial should help you get up to speed.
- We're going to use the 47 Effects MIDI Library as the heart of the example projects.