[sdiy] My latest project

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 1:31 AM, Tom Wiltshire wrote:

> 
> At the moment my ability to make nice sounds with it is considerably hampered by it having no envelopes, keyboard, or control panel of any sort. This makes it pretty much unplayable. My recent questions about an LCD display were in connection with me trying to make a all-purpose Xpander-style test interface with a couple of 2x40 displays and eight encoders. This would give me a simple way to edit any number of parameters in a synth whilst testing. If I added MIDI IN to it, I could even play a tune. Well, maybe not a 'tune'...

User Interface issues during prototype phase are a nuisance. One thing I've been doing recently that seems to work quite nicely and doesn't require a lot of hardware is to use the dsPIC UART to talk to a terminal emulator on my PC. I've built a simple command interpreter that lets me get / set hardware values. For your application this might even carry over to the final application as one way to control the voice cards.

If you're interested I've got some recent code up here:

http://members.cox.net/ebrombaugh1/synth/dsPIC_fpga/fpga1.zip

which might have some useful tidbits in it.

Eric