[PD] pd on mini devices

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Mon Oct 31 13:00:00 CET 2011


On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:34:18 +0900
i go bananas <hard.off at gmail.com> wrote:

> well, something like that raspberry or the beagleboard looks absolutely
> great, IF i can get one to run pd with just some really minimal patch.
> 
> the most important thing is low latency.  i know how hard that is to get
> even on a 'proper' computer, so that's going to be the hard thing, yeah?

The basic arrangement is a real-time kernel and ALSA. If you can get those
running you have a start. But very few people have any inclination to
mess around at that level. Something like http://www.emdebian.org/ is
often at the heart of a usable system.

Bear in mind that you have no hard drive. So a good idea is to make a 
live system. That means the whole system boots from a USB compressed
filesystem and runs only in RAM. If you partition the USB stick and
create a persistent home directory, then you have what behaves like
a normal desktop. Except you won't want a desktop.

The bare bones are

 Kernel
 core-utils, busybox
 ALSA
 telnet/ssh

With ssh you have a handle on the device, you can log in, transfer
files using scp, remotely start and stop services. Try compiling a simple
test program that produces a sine wave and get that coming out your audio
device. Then see if you can get vanilla Pd on there. Note that if you
go the Debian or Arch route you'll be able to use a package manager
to pull a pre-built version for ARM very easily. 

apt-get install puredata

This is high level guidance. Before getting stuck in see what
some of the others say. I haven't played with this for a few months and 
it's a fast moving stream. There may be one or more off-the-shelf ways of 
getting Pd running on a small board ARM or intel, but you want a
suitable kernel to try real-time guitar fx.

a.





> 
> i don't mind if the device is a bit bigger.  but you know...even these
> smart phones now can run pretty decent pd patches.  surely there has to be
> some good option with dedicated audio in/out and low latency???
> 
> i can attempt a custom linux install even but i'd need some hand holding.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Andy Farnell <padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk>wrote:
> 
> >
> > It's a current topic at the London hackspace.
> > Im often thinking about new development boards that can run
> > a decent guitar FX patch with usable latency on a playing
> > card sized board costing less than a $50
> >
> > Depends what you mean by mini devices though.
> >
> > In theory a usable CPU only board would need USB,
> > and a power supply, everything else, including
> > LAN and audio can be added.
> >
> > Most SBCs are actually very expensive dollar per cycle but
> > there are some interesting possibilities
> >
> > http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78
> > http://beagleboard.org/
> >
> >
> > a.
> >
> > On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:39:39 +0900
> > i go bananas <hard.off at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > (this is a duplicate post i did on the forum, but want to see if i can
> > get
> > > help here)
> > >
> > >
> > > is there someone here doing pd on mini devices yet?
> > >
> > >
> > > i want something with low latency, audio output at least, but audio
> > in/out
> > > even better.. the ability to connect some sort of sensors or controllers
> > > (even really basic stuff)
> > >
> > > basically, i want to put pd in a guitar pedal.
> > >
> > > any help?
> > >
> > > cheap would be best, but i have a small budget i could use if a good
> > option
> > > is not bargain basement.
> > >
> > > i must also mention that i'm really not good at soldering, and my coding
> > > ability in anything other than PD is pretty shocking.
> > >
> > > what options are there?  i have heard of beagle board, does that work?
> >
> >
> > --
> > Andy Farnell <padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk>
> >


-- 
Andy Farnell <padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk>



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