MOTM

From: "Paul Schreiber"
>
> But *also* suppose deep in the MOTM R&D labs, a super PSIM is
brewing....heh
> heh.....ARM7...heh...heh...250,000 gate Xilinx array with USB
> controller...heh...heh....18bit ADC/DACs....heh...heh.......

Well, sounds interesting!

Actually, I'm surprised that nobody else has already developed (and shipped
;-) a module like the PSIM. I believe that Bret Truchan was designing on a
similar thing when the PSIM was announced; he probably should've kept going
with it.

One of the PSIM's strengths is that it's programmable in BASIC. I hope that
the MOTM device will be easy for users to program. DSP programming is
notoriously tricky.

Cost is another issue. In theory, the PSIM is only $300 without MIDI. Maybe
a reasonable target price for the MOTM module is $500, same as the upcoming
MOTM-600 and MOTM-650 modules. The number of potential buyers probably drops
rapidly as the price goes north of $500.

Now, the PSIM is relatively affordable, but it doesn't process audio -- it's
not fast enough and the converters aren't set up for that (and they aren't
16- or 18-bit). It's plenty fast enough for quantizing, shift registers,
sequencers, and so on; in other words, it's great for CV processing. On the
other hand, this MOTM module would clearly function as an audio processor,
so maybe it's a different animal.

There will remain a niche for a low cost, easy-to-program, CV processor like
the PSIM. There's no need for 18-bit conversion and megaFLOPs of performance
in such a module. If it were based on the same processor as the PSIM, it
would even be simple to convert programs from one to the other. Anybody...?
--
john