coming up for air
It’s been quiet on my corner of the blog but for good reason. We are in the home stretch.
I sent all of SuONOIO’s parts and circuit boards to the factory. They will be coming home very soon. In the meantime we have been polishing up the instrument’s effects and modulation destinations – I am really becoming attached to the delay in particular. So much development has happened in the last few weeks… the included effects range from subtle to pleasant to extreme.
About the programming: Because SuONOIO is a digital instrument, most of its capabilities and behaviors are defined in firmware. So, we are able to refine and extend the nature of the instrument even after it is physically built, without having to worry about rebuilding parts of the circuit… we just have to upload a new data file to the instrument instead. This accelerated our design and production schedule by a couple weeks – the factory can start building all of the SuONOIOs while the firmware gets worked on at home. This is probably the most satisfying part of the project for me, because it is the most collaborative. Alessandro and I exchange ideas for the best possible operation of the instrument daily. He’s got a working SuONOIO and programming setup just like mine, so whenever I make changes to the code, I can send him a file and he’ll be listening just a few minutes later, ready to suggest changes or new features. I bet we’ll be playing around with the firmware up until the day it’s supposed to go out the door.
Awesome! So does this mean we could tweak the firmware if we really wanted to? Not that I’d know how… but just asking
Comment by David on September 11, 2010 at 11:58 pm
if the firmware code gets published as open source, that would be neat to be able to create new abilities and whatnot, but there would probably be many who’d mess up their SuONOIOs trying to modify them with custom firmware, in which case there should also be some factory default reset button. as an alternative, Alessandro and company could get suggestions from people and do the code work, then make firmware updates available on the site with instructions on how to properly install them. any expansion should be cool to see, however it’s done…
Comment by Jeremy on September 14, 2010 at 9:15 am
There are currently no plans to publish source code for this thing, I’d have to make it readable/maintainable by the public, remove the dirty words, etc etc. Even so, the design of the platform is such that writing the code requires intimate knowledge of the DSPIC33 series and the appropriate programmer hardware/test equipment.
That said, if you have that kind of familiarity there’s really nothing stopping you from writing your own code for the device (the peripheral pin assignments are fairly obvious after staring at it for a couple minutes) but you’d probably be better off with either a general purpose DSPIC dev board, or a synthDIY-appropriate design like Eric Brombaugh’s awesome “DSPIC AUDIO DAC” board.
Comment by Scott on September 14, 2010 at 10:41 pm
This is some great info and was well worth the read. I hope to read more stuff from you in the future that is as well written as this post
Comment by Roadarmel on June 21, 2012 at 2:26 am