Open Source DSP based hardware synth

[antto]

yes.. i also prefer to make my own, since i'm not rich enough
but it turns out making your own sometimes (too often maybe) ends up more expensive when you sum things up

[b&t]

Look at this: http://www.sonic-potions.com/lxr
That's a really nice project, would be possibile to make it using these chips that you're talking about?

It's always welcome to me DIY stuff, don't get me wrong

Yes man that looks like a sick project, possible definitely. I think you'd be able to make a cheaper one with the xmos route, looking around for even dev boards for something like the ARM M4 and this is what I got: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor ... s/7989711/

£245, not a nice entry level for DIY'ers! so just to prototype with the same chip as the drum machine is just silly. I think, if I'm not wrong, using the concurrent co-processor in XMOS with a raspberry pie doing crap you don't wanna do in pure C (like midi) and the XMOS dsp doing all the DSP jobs would be more effective for hobby prototyping, cheaper and more powerful.

[b&t]

yes.. i also prefer to make my own, since i'm not rich enough
but it turns out making your own sometimes (too often maybe) ends up more expensive when you sum things up

Could not agree with you more, I have tried to materialise other things in the past with view to it being cheaper than buying, only to still be a grand out of pocket later!

But a raspberry pi (£30), a XMOS audio slice (£25) and an XMOS stark kit (£10), and a few pots and a breadboard (£10), so around £60 isn't too bad to loose when you could potentially make something quite brilliant and unique.

Don't worry I'll find out whether or not this is a giant waste of time, if it's successful I'll make a tutorial and we can all have fun!

[whyterabbyt]

Idealism and being up-todate with the latest technology has and always will knock the big guys out of business.

Erm, no.

[UltraJv]

@ b&t - Kudos for going open source BUT we get this all the time at KVR with the make a quick buck and kill em thing. If you sell a kit - great, it wont cost much above and beyond what you expect. If you want something to be successful, check out whats already available. Youll find plenty of free projects for synths. Arduino is well catered for. Doing it with Raspeberry Pi is harder because its not well supported for audio. You wont make much but its community spirit and all that. If its assembled PCBs/units thats a different story. You will need to obtain CE and FCC approval. This will cost tens of thousands + Its all down to your code. If you've got the best filters and oscillators out there, you can claim a niche.

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q= ... th&spell=1

[raikard233]

You will need to obtain CE and FCC approval.

One of the things that discouraged me without time and budget...

[thetechnobear]

We have the potential to make Access/UAD/Nord, basically go out of business, by development from the open source community. All these £1000 devices TI/NordLead/octatrack etc as built on boards you can put in your hands for under £50 at present.

again, not to be harsh... but not only are you underestimating the hardware knowledge required,
but also the software development ... these are large complex pieces of software that take a lot of effort to write/debug/test.
(also remember, its not as if the manufactures you mention, don't have access to these chips, and more!)

So, Id cut back on these wild claims, I think they discredit a good underlying point,
these chips do open many doors for new DIY ventures...
Possibly some interesting niche synths, or as you say, for bespoke digital synths, perhaps even a 'hardware supported' Reaktor ?

Anyway, thanks for the heads up on the boards, I do have an unrelated project that could possibly make use of them

[Chopper]

Idealism and being up-todate with the latest technology has and always will knock the big guys out of business.

Erm, no.

fiuwwwwww... I thought for a while that I was alone to spot the hopeless utopia there...

[BertKoor]

Can be done smaller & cheaper
(but not totally open source)

[b&t]

Thanks for the comments guys, I really appreciate all your thoughts and perspectives.

I know idealism and engineering are never really be mixed... "It WILL fly if I hope hard enough"

I've played around with making 8bit synths with Arduino a good 5/6 years ago. Was good fun, got into programming progressively more obsessively since and here I am, still in wonders of what geeks will do with tech.

I'm not talking about manufacturing anything myself, no boards, no nothing, using pre built available parts in a similar sense to the arduino, but catered for high end AUDIO. Literally just a free instruction set so other can people can play around with taking their sound creations to embedded devices.

You can do this at the moment with Raspi, but as someone mentioned, it doesn't like doing DSP, there are some hacks around but it's not effective, but people have put Csound on a raspi for instance. The best way beyond this, is using a multi-core co processor.

The XC language and XMOS intrigued me as a new paradigm to get better cheaper results than the FPGA method.

Look I'm an idealist but also an engineer and i'll engineer me some idealism whenever I need some, as otherwise I would get nothing done. You know how many projects I've done where the hardest part was starting, due to the shear magnitude of the idea, thoughts like: it's gonna take forever, I'm not clever enough, I haven't solved this one problem properly yet etc, you just gotta start, and that takes idealism. Not skill, talent or experience, they come after the idealism/optimism to even try to start.

I'll stand by the idea that by democratising access to high end technology, will be a major part of the catalyst that throws some of the manufacturing giants off their throne.

The landscape is changing around us, with the ease at which things can be prototyped and access to chips we don't have to develop ourselves to solve the problems, actually we have an abundance of chips we haven't got a clue how to use effectively.

The big manufactures have to be using this same tech to keep up, you're right whoever said that. I'm giving you some trade secrets essentially as I don't know when to shut up, and I like free open source access to things you wouldn't otherwise be able to have. I like that idea, it's served Linux very well over the years. I will try and do the same for synths, as a hobby on the side, as I just found out how to make a credit card sized server that runs on 5v more efficient than a 400w one, for a tenth of the price, I could quite easily make some decent money off that for a bit. And sys ad guys get paid pretty decently if i'm not mistaken!

On the front of the synth again, I had a thought that I'm going to completely over engineer it and make it way more powerful that it actually needs to be, I'm just gonna completely over do it in every single way when I build one for myself!

Very much a for myself project, I have no interest in profiting, only in the awesomeness of the device, and an element of notoriety if I release the code publicly. Which seems to me a decent way to help score a job in an industry I'm passionate about. Should never have said knock the big guys off, if I want to work at one!...

... I wonder if i had acted less like an excited jack russel and more like a 15 year old labrador, it would have been a more fruitful dialogue!

[b&t]

ok so just to let you guys know, xmos probably isn't the best way to go *yet*, i've been looking down the dsp dev route, and have found some interesting things, such as the line 6 dsp dev pedal $200, Texas Instruments dsp dev board $100, and this nxp dev board, that looks the most straight to work of the all: http://uk.farnell.com/nxp/lpc4357-k43wq ... dp/2218565 for £52 w/LCD screen. So that's pretty decent, and the software they are using is signal flow/graphic based, ideal for prototyping.

Will post back when I've got some noise.

[aciddose]

Why hardware though? You need to have a reason for hardware and as it is, you're better off with software. There are zero advantages to hardware unless you start off without a PC.

If you are sending the audio back through an audio interface and into a PC anyway, how canyou justify running the code on dedicated hardware when you have massively more powerful hardware inside the PC?

You can't.

We can justify analog electronics because the computational cost of producing a reasonable model for a $5 circuit is potentially going to take $1000 of computing hardware. We can build far more complex analog circuits than our hardware will ever be able to match and it will remain almost indefinitely far less expensive to do so.

[b&t]

Why hardware though? You need to have a reason for hardware and as it is, you're better off with software. There are zero advantages to hardware unless you start off without a PC.

If you are sending the audio back through an audio interface and into a PC anyway, how canyou justify running the code on dedicated hardware when you have massively more powerful hardware inside the PC?

You can't.

We can justify analog electronics because the computational cost of producing a reasonable model for a $5 circuit is potentially going to take $1000 of computing hardware. We can build far more complex analog circuits than our hardware will ever be able to match and it will remain almost indefinitely far less expensive to do so.

The virus isn't an analogue piece of hardware, it's virtual analogue machine meaning there's a chip inside. It's a little tiny computer with an operating system and everything. It's a computer with GPIO, a processor, some DAC's.ADC's, and a butt tonne of code. And a few pots.

Why hardware? I sold a Virus TI a while ago and want to fill the void by building my own. They are very expensive to buy new and I want to build something as close as I can get to it, for the lowest cost, without having a team of engineers. Also some sort of proto dev board route, that would be adaptable to create guitar pedals/reverbs/filters etc.

I kinda see what you're saying. But i'm pretty sure you're wrong on just about every level, this is 2014, there's a raspi that's more powerful than the macs in around 2007. For £25, that's not bad, is that the computer you were referring to costing $1000? Oh and the thing is your PC's not that powerful, it's not really making the most of multicores, and none of your programs or synths are either. And yeah you can get a credit card sized computer that's as good or better spec than your PC for a fraction of the price.

Affordable super computing at $100 is around now, but no-one knows how to use it or what to do with it or make the most out of the multicore/multithread processors. This seems like a decent exploratory project that might help benefit a few computer users down the line.

The biggest problem computing faces is working in parallel, concurrent languages like Open CL, are under used by even the makers of Logic. We have great tech, but no-one actually really uses it.

Look after all is said and done, just be glad you're not as stupid as me who's gonna spend the next three years writing oscillators in various assembly languages!! Don't pity the fool

[camsr]

The PC is primarily about treating audio as data. VA hardware does the same but only in a limited scope. If latencies between devices could be minimized, "hardware" could extend the functionality of the PC, but it's the PC that's doing the organization.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Why hardware though? You need to have a reason for hardware and as it is, you're better off with software. There are zero advantages to hardware unless you start off without a PC.

If you are sending the audio back through an audio interface and into a PC anyway, how canyou justify running the code on dedicated hardware when you have massively more powerful hardware inside the PC?

You can't.

We can justify analog electronics because the computational cost of producing a reasonable model for a $5 circuit is potentially going to take $1000 of computing hardware. We can build far more complex analog circuits than our hardware will ever be able to match and it will remain almost indefinitely far less expensive to do so.

The virus isn't an analogue piece of hardware, it's virtual analogue machine meaning there's a chip inside. It's a little tiny computer with an operating system and everything. It's a computer with GPIO, a processor, some DAC's.ADC's, and a butt tonne of code. And a few pots.

Why hardware? I sold a Virus TI a while ago and want to fill the void by building my own. They are very expensive to buy new and I want to build something as close as I can get to it, for the lowest cost, without having a team of engineers. Also some sort of proto dev board route, that would be adaptable to create guitar pedals/reverbs/filters etc.

I kinda see what you're saying. But i'm pretty sure you're wrong on just about every level, this is 2014, there's a raspi that's more powerful than the macs in around 2007. For £25, that's not bad, is that the computer you were referring to costing $1000? Oh and the thing is your PC's not that powerful, it's not really making the most of multicores, and none of your programs or synths are either. And yeah you can get a credit card sized computer that's as good or better spec than your PC for a fraction of the price.

Affordable super computing at $100 is around now, but no-one knows how to use it or what to do with it or make the most out of the multicore/multithread processors. This seems like a decent exploratory project that might help benefit a few computer users down the line.

The biggest problem computing faces is working in parallel, concurrent languages like Open CL, are under used by even the makers of Logic. We have great tech, but no-one actually really uses it.

Look after all is said and done, just be glad you're not as stupid as me who's gonna spend the next three years writing oscillators in various assembly languages!! Don't pity the fool

virus is a little computer running a great software. There is no point of creating hardware without a powerful software. Building hardware is funny, but before you need building software, and you don't need any hardware for that. You can't damage a big hardware company, simply because they worked before on software, which is the real value added - access, waldorf, roland, korg... they are incredibly good companies.
So the correct path is: you need really good software, than maybe you can build a good hardware (there are plenty of ways for getting a good product), than maybe you'll be an other company like waldorf, trying to starving in this difficoult niche market, where the hardware seems to go down each incoming day, while software, tablets and mobile are going up.

Just my few cents, because reading your statements it seems like once you have a cheap way for building hardware you put some simple conventional software on it and suddenly access goes out of business