Practical
Simplifying product design and reducing the Bill of Material
A richer communication system allows designing products that do more for the benefit of the user while costing less to manufacture.
- CopperLan enables many functions to be established automatically without any user intervention; this allows removing knobs and sometimes displays that were dedicated to those uses. Additionally, it simplifies the software design by providing this entire functionality ready to use.
- Dropping the display or even the entire set of physical controls reduces the price drastically (see the blind box concept hereafter)
-
Given the huge processing power of today's electronics, generous polyphony has become mainstream in sound generators.
The bottleneck in accessing it all is the number of channels onto which the voices can be mapped; In the physical world, this leads to a pair of connectors for each set of 16 MIDI channels; by contrast, a single CopperLan connection gives a pooled access to a practically limitless number of peers at blazing speed.
Migrating a MIDI design to CopperLan
Adoption starting at zero design change
One might think that adopting CopperLan automatically implies a complete hardware redesign.
This is not the case; some existing MIDI products can even be upgraded to CopperLan by software only!
Renovate a finalized design
Many MIDI devices today have a USB connection to talk MIDI with a computer; A CopperLan upgraded product can use this USB connection as its sole CopperLan compliant link.
It is possible that the existing layout and labeling of the product are reusable as-is for a migration to a CopperLan-based product; otherwise, a panel re-labeling could be the only change needed beyond the firmware update.
MIDI compatibility preserved
While being optional, it is likely that many initial CopperLan products will also offer the standard MIDI connectors.
Seen from the network topology view, these MIDI connections become CopperLan virtual devices, through which MIDI IN and MIDI OUT are source and target for standard CopperLan data.
To achieve that, the only MIDI-related software you have to provide is the one caring about the low-level data transmission and reception to and from the physical ports.
The CHAI is offered with CopperLanMIDI conversion routines and virtual MIDI ports management.
Nike do biegania, treningowe i na co dzień