[sdiy] Anadigm...

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 13:04 +0100, Olivier Gillet wrote:
> > This demonstrates to me that hardware design is actually the simpler part of modern analogue synth design. The software design is the larger and more complicated part of the process, since it probably includes all the envelopes, LFOs, modulation matrix/routing, as well as the system-level stuff like programmability, MIDI handling, control surface, etc etc. The hardware for stuff like this is straightforward. Making it actually work is not.
> 
> What I found is that getting all this stuff from "nothing" to "can be
> demoed" can be done very quickly. Gordon talked about one afternoon, I
> got the first Shruti code from scratch in 15 nights (including MIDI
> handling, note stack, menu system, oscillators synthesis / CV
> generation), but this was before this was my first microcontroller

Yeah; the Shruti is a bit more powerful.  Just a bit.

> project. Then it took months to perfect, refine, and get to a state
> where I could say things sort of "felt right". You can't replace the
> lessons learned from hours of testing: rare bugs, UI things, creative

Testing.  Yes, I did some testing.  Then I wrote down all the things
that didn't work.

> moments when you want to do something and you are shocked you haven't
> planned a way to achieve it and feel the urge to fix the product to
> let you do it... It takes weeks of field testing and/or experience
> with several similar past projects to figure how some things should be
> done, even if, in the end, they materialize only a dozen lines of
> code... The devil is in the details after all. Which makes me believe
> that if you want to ship a synth in 12 months, you need to have it
> almost right in 2 or 3 months.

It's something I've found with various open-source projects, the most
recent being my SDR app lysdr - getting it working is easy, getting it
working *right* is slightly harder, but see getting it working when you
let people who have never used it before loose on it?  Prepare yourself
for weeks of "oh wait what?  you did what to it?".

Gordon MM0YEQ