[PD] Pd Vanilla on Raspberry Pi

[Michael Zacherl]

Hi again, 

On 10.8.2012, at 09:10 , Pierre Massat wrote:

> @ Richie : I haven't tried the GPIO yet. I find it a bit frustrating when they say that audio input can be added easily through the GPIO. I don't think it's true. It would take a lot of hardware around a good ADC, plus I guess a custom driver. There aren't any DIY audio ADCs on the web that I know of, except a project by a German guy who builds ADCs and DACs frm scratch.

I'm not sure if Richie meant audio in when he talked about GPIO. 
But, @Richie, since Python is the tool of choice on the RPi world it shouldn't be too hard to get some decent control of external hardware via Pd.
However, Pierre, I share your thought about GPIO and audio and I'm not sure if that's the route to go.
There would be a lot of effort to get this done and I rather prefer to get something like Jack running smoothly (which currently isn't due to driver issues, IIRC).
I'd rather get a small, cheapish USB audio interface running which I also could strip and mount into the same box with the RPi.
If this works, I don't see a reason why some serious hardware like an RME Fireface UCX shouldn't run as well in Class Compliant Mode.
(which would be rather funny, but why not if somebody got it at hands?)

> One thing I would like to know is how difficult it would be to run Pd on this machine at a very low level, with a very minimal OS (I know nothing about this kind of things). 700MHz is a lot I believe, considering that a lot of digital audio gear was available before this chips were affordable. I'm pretty sure that a standard digital multi-effects for instance doesn't need 700MHz at all.

Ethernet is done via USB on the RPi, that's one reason they didn't go for gigabit ethernet, just wouldn't make sense.
So I sense (lack of knowledge though) some potential to strip down the OS to free ressources.
Also a RT-kernel is planned, but there I don't know much else, didn't use a RT-system so far.
At some point I'll go through the points listed here and see what it can do:  http://puredata.info/community/pdwiki/Optimize/

> I've been dreaming of building this "Pd box" people have been talking about for many months now, and I can imagine what a revolution it would be if it was open source.

oh yes, and the RPi can run from four AA batteries ...  ;-)

m.

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