SAMD21J piano

Fun example of a USB MIDI piano based on SAMD21J.

Design

Board

Schematic

The schematic is very simple:

Programming bootloader

This board is designed to interconnect with a 2x5 swd connector:

The sam BA bootloader can be found here.

Problem #1: missing ground

I quickly realized I forgot to connect GND_4 to the common GND of the circuit, and the chip wasn’t responding when programming. I had to solder add a bypass wire:

Here is a closeup of the bypass:

Problem #2: edbg doesn’t recognize SAMD21JE17

After the previous step, edbg was reporting a different error:

>> edbg -ebpv -t samd21 -f .\sam_ba_SAMD21J17A.bin
Debugger: Alex Taradov Generic CMSIS-DAP Adapter 598682CF v0.1 (S)
Clock frequency: 16.0 MHz
Error: unknown target device (DSU_DID = 0x10010301)

This error meant that reading the chip’s ID was successful, but it was not recognized. I had to add the following line in edbg’s target_atmel_cm0p.c and recompile it:

This fix is available on my fork of edbg, and I will send a pull request to Alex to include it in the official release.

Arduino code

The code makes extensive use of Adafruit’s FreeTouch, for its simplicity. Here is a simple usage of a qtouch pad:

Adafruit_FreeTouch qt = Adafruit_FreeTouch(pins_piano[i], OVERSAMPLE_4, RESISTOR_50K, FREQ_MODE_NONE);

qt.begin();

int value = qt.measure();

The following settings should be set when programming:

License

This project is provided under the MIT License.