Open-Heart Surgery

12:47 2 Comments

Although it is more like a full heart transplant... careful, very technical post!

Until now, the MidiGurdy used a small 8-bit microcontroller as the main computing unit, handling everything from sensor reading, modelling of sensor values to implementing the MIDI USB connection. And all of that with just 16 MHz!

But feedback from players suggests that a built-in sound module is actually very important. Most players would want to pick up the instrument, plug in headphones or an amp and crank away. Fiddling with iPad apps or even more complicated synths is great for some people, but not for the "casual player".

So... we need internal sound production! Doing it properly and with good quality on the 8-bit microcontroller is difficult (if not impossible). We need more power!

I've decided on a dual-core ARM board running at 1GHz. The board is fast enough for very high quality software sampling in addition to all other functions previously handled by the microcontroller. And all of that running on a real-time Linux! Also has the added benefit of giving me a much easier development environment...  it's a Linux system after all... and it's got WLAN connectivity :-)

I still have to see how long the battery lasts with this little baby, but early tests suggest more than 10 hours. That should be more than enough for the odd practice session or a stage performance.

Oh, and the Linux base system and the MidiGurdy software will be released under an open-source license. So you could even fiddle with it yourself, if you are so inclined.

I need a few more days to recreate all the functionality onto the new core. After that, I will add a few more hardware controls to the instrument.