[sdiy] The penultimate soft DIY platform?

[karl dalen]

Well, this has been up here some years ago, i tought i make retake
at it once again, so why havent anyone made a open surce Music/Sound
DSP platform?

There has been all these discussions about FPGA this, TI/AD/MOT DSP 
that, dsPIC here, over clocked AVR there, Beagleboard here and so
on, i mean most of these approaches are dead ends, right?

A dual Atom core mini ITX or so with everything on board with a 
dedicated audio, im not saying OS but a simple audio frame work
firmware that are dedicated to audio only could easily outperform
most dedicated solder-yourself-attempts-BGA-2000-balls + extra-hassle
one-wendor-FPGA-lock-yourself-into-tool-stuff and such.

I mean something that allows the developer sync to USB subframes
with 4 lines of code, 16/32 sample buffering audio and some kind of
API that simulates a big donkey OS so one could perhaps, maybe run
the regular standard development tools...No just a frame firmware
who just sits and wait for code from your regular PC who runs the
regular dev tool set whatever Cobol ,Fortran version you may use.

That board could easily be any Chinese sub 100 euro, and when it
becomes obsolete you lift the code over to whatever new there are.

Yes there would be software/hardware implications but could be
solved due to the lack of insane stack of OS based extras runtime
whatever code, one just dont need drivers for everything that's on
the board.

One problem (HW) i can see are the closed system aproach regular
PC's have but many of these ITX boards have some openings with
integrated CF card reader HW trough a bridge, it may not be
blazing fast but for interfaceing your own HW without aditional
8bit PIC's on a UART kind of thing it could be well enough. 

Quite frankly i think Korg is doing this with their Kronos
at least they uses a dual Atom core platform. ;)

Regards
KD