[sdiy] Microcontrollers for eurorack use... What to use?

[Olivier Gillet]

> On the other hand, I've never had a project where I needed to use anything outside the provided IDE and debugger.

The problem is that most debuggers are not really designed for
realtime DSP applications (though they are perfectly fine for
debugging other functionalities of a synth - like the MIDI
implementation, the user interface...). Few debuggers have plotting
(TI's Code Composer almost gets it right though) or stream acquisition
abilities, and when they have, they provide few options to perform
analysis on the data. I wish instead they could work more like
oscilloscopes and logic analyzers - with trigger conditions,
measurements, cursors, protocol decoders... Say I hear an occasional
click in the output of my DSP code. The easiest way I've found to work
through such issues is to run the code locally, dump all state
variables in a big file, and inspect it in a python shell in which I
can evaluate expressions on the data and plot things to my heart's
content. Sometimes that would even be outside the bandwidth of what a
JTAG interface do.

Another thing I like doing which is not possible in an IDE is to
automatically check if large code transformations still produce
correct results (identical or with mostly small difference) - run the
code locally to generate .wav files with both versions, load the data
and compute statistics on the difference is what I do.

Overall, having the ability to quickly put a bit of DSP or applicative
code "in vitro" to feed it very specific inputs and test patterns is
something too precious to make me switch to an IDE. I guess it's a
matter of the type of product - whether most of the development time
will be spent (and value added will be present) in the low-level
hardware functionality and interface, or in the DSP code/synth engine
itself.