Synth Programmer

[Christopher_List at Sonymusic.Com]

  So I spent a couple of hours last night pouring over chapters 10 and 11
  of The Art of Electronics - trying to absorb as much as possible in the
  short amount of time. It really doesn't seem that difficult to do uC
  designs - through it's definitely not the kind of thing I'd want to do on
  protoboard :).

  So, to keep the discussion going, what sort of input/output voltage range
  should this thing have?
  0-5v is the obvious choice - this would have a resolution of about
  .02mV/bit for 8bit conversion.
  Perhaps some of the values should be stored as 0-5 and some as -5 to +5?

  Anyone want to make a hard and fast vote on a processor? The 68000 sounds
  very cool and powerful - I also like it's forward-reading assembler
  notation better than the Intel (bad reason for picking a chip - I know).
  I'd also be into the 68000 because that's what my uWaver uses, and a
  uWave has half of the circuitry we're trying to make! It's got one muxed
  DAC driving 32 control voltages! Not to mention MIDI, an LCD, and a data
  wheel (heck, it even generates wavetable audio - but who cares about that
  stuff :). Seems like we could just take the schematics for their digital
  board, pair them down, add the ADC's, write the firmware - and we're
  there. We'd need to come up with a choice for an octal sample and hold -
  because the one they use is CEM and I don't know if it's cheap and/or
  available...

  OTOH, half of the group seems inclined towards the 8051 line. If this
  thing can run a Jupiter I'm sure it can do what we're trying to do. If
  poeple who can actually do the design are more comfortable with this IC,
  then that's probably where we should stay. I believe this chip is used in
  my Fatman - yes? It's probably a cheaper and simpler alternative.

  Thoughts anyone?

  - Chris