[sdiy] FPGA/Synth DIY thoughts

[Magnus Danielson]

From: "Paul Maddox" <Paul.Maddox at Wavesynth.com>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] FPGA/Synth DIY thoughts
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 23:33:42 +0100

> JB,
> 
> > Your suggestion seems to concern fields already covered by SDIY
> > and music-dsp... I mean pure hardware topics relative to FPGA
> > have already popped-up on SDIY, while software questions
> > appeared several times on music-dsp...
> 
> True, but I worry about the content getting a little too VHDL/Verilog for
> Synth DIY (no offence guys, but do you really wanna see lots of VHDL code?)

As allways, you end up in the beginning having trouble with VHDL
technicalities. Paul experienced this himself. Fortunately I was only
an email away...

However, once you've got over the initial hurdles you can work more on
an abstract level, and less code needs to hit the list. What replaces
code is however still quite sad, since you end up tossing simpler
algebraic expressions instead, and also have side-discussions on how
to best model this and that... which is about as exciting as
discussing which solder to use, which cleaning agent which wont make
your children commies etc.

The fruits of the discussions is however interesting. In one end, I do
think that it could stay on Synth-DIY. These days capable FPGAs have
become very cheap and the investment level is degrees lower than
before. While some people are obsessed with putting things in CPUs, I
am more obsessed with putting things into FPGAs and CPLDs.

We've also seen some discussions on the use of CPLDs for
Walsh-generation, just to name an example.

There are many things that you can do with these that more or less
relates to Synths, but now you can DIY at least. We can allways ask
people to avoid tossing big lumps of code directly on the list, there
are web-servers or private-email available for that, but other than
that I think that the discussions could be good for many.

Cheers,
Magnus