Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Quiet?

For my 5U system I bought a BegleBone Black, some color LCD
touch-enabled panels, and built a LINUX dev machine. The base idea is
to create a decent quality A/D - D/A cape that will match MOTM I/O
levels, deal with CV, gate, and MIDI. The next step is to port PD to
the BeagleBone. I think Pure Data on a 'Bone would be a pretty cool
toy for starters. The ability to change application code via USB,
Ethernet, or an SDCARD makes maintenance a cakewalk. With this
compute platform and such connectivity, many doors would be widely
open. Open-source hardware plus open-source O/S plus open-source
applications, would help to make this future-proof. Nothing closed
... all open ... sweet! I am surprised others have not mentioned
this, though I am certain many other smarter people than me, have
thought of this ... it is obvious.

At the least, this generic platform would be a nice launchpad for
other endpoints. With a 1GHz processor board and a decent amount of
memory & I/O for $45, this would hard to beat. A large community for
Beagle Bone support helps move this along. This is far better than my
first idea of using an OMAP-L138 SOM (too under-powered and too
expensive). This generic module with a MOTM wrapper could be pressed
into any number of functional blocks. Might even become a ROMpler for
saved MOTM-produced sounds. Dial up what you created six months ago
and get it polyphonically for cheap. Your audio tinker-toy makes the
original sounds and this gizmotron reproduces them on demand. This
method completely sidesteps the need for an expensive audio-grade PC
and closed software that has the lifetime of a fruit fly and costs a
fortune. Sequence with one of these. Hell, stick a hub in the
cabinet, link them together. Or stick a large LCD in the cabinet and
be Keith Emerson with a color monitor that does something. Whatever.

The expansion possibilities are endless. And with an assembled $45
compute platform, that competes nicely with say a VCO board blank at
$39 a pop! What sacrilege ... digital infecting a pure analog
sound-chain!? Yeah. My laserdisc was analog and it was nice. Hard
to find Avatar on laserdisc, though. On blu-Ray ... no problem. No
offense, but I'd much rather get time delay subfunctions digitally
than from BBD chips. My interest is outcomes, not methods.

I am probably crazy but someone has to be the village idiot. It is
after all, a sociologically important function according to Mr.
Cleese.

My brain hurts ... it will have to be removed.
Tom Farrand