[PD] Pd Vanilla on Raspberry Pi

[Michael Zacherl]

On 11.8.2012, at 14:15 , Charles Goyard wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Pierre Massat wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> There's a big difference between a dedicated chip or a microcontroller
> with a single-task firmware, and a general purpose multitasking OS. A
> 2USD chip with a few lines of code can do nanosecond accurate timings,
> where you need a real-time flavor and a lot of pain to achieve the same
> with Linux on a PC. There's just two different kind of beasts.
> 
> I feel there's a lot of deception coming about the Rasberry Pi's
> capabilities. But well, it's pretty good for the price.

it is!
Looking at the http://raspberry.org site the list of interesting or just funny 
but nevertheless nice projects grows constantly.
You're absolutely right regarding timing and OS issues.
I never (never say never again ;-) would use a thing like the RPi for building 
just a controller which is much easier and more efficiently implemented 
with an AVR or PIC in their respective environments.
The ARM's floating point power is so-so, but there is some potential to use this 
tiny thing in an installation to combine for instance sound and hardware control within one kit.
And it can be run from batteries (I personally didn't test that so far, but that's on my long to-do list.)
At the moment Pd is the only environment of this kind of software which is within reach to be 
usable for serious applications.
Supercollider could be next, but this still needs Jack Audio which isn't running on the RPi so far.
And since Python is the programming language of choice to access the I/O hardware on the RPI 
it looks pretty good to get being very usable within Pd.

m.


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