Bela (embedded music-centric hardware)

#1

Pretty exciting stuff:

Just wish there was an easier way to get Max-ish code on to it (other than gen-code exporting?).

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#2

This looks pretty cool. Iā€™m tempted to get one.

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#3

Looks like they are thinking mainly about Pd support.

There are some resources for converting max files to Pd here, but Iā€™m guessing they probably donā€™t always work. https://puredata.info/docs/tutorials/PdForMaxUsers

I wonder what its power requirements are and what potential for eurorack packaging there may be.

#4

Yeah, touting Pd pretty strongly with code conversion.

Unfortunately for all the kind of Max-ing I do, itā€™s pretty heavy lifting (non-convertable to Pd).

Itā€™s great to see something thatā€™s focused on music specifically though, with built in audio/analog/digital I/O (even onboard powered speaker outputs!).

#5

looks like the pd->C code conversion itself is not open-source? Kind of tempted to order a cape to play around with, though also kind of unhappy if some of the money goes to a company piggybacking off free software & not releasing their source codeā€¦

#6

I wonder what its power requirements are and what potential for eurorack packaging there may be.

The beaglebone black runs on 5V and 2amps is recommended minimum when using capes -
according to ModMyPi. I couldnā€™t find the power specs on the official site but didnā€™t look too hard either.

#7

Welp, I ordered one. I generally avoid Kickstarters, but this one just hit too many ā€œoohā€ buttons for me.

#8

Hello,
I have been to one hacklab this summer at the Queen Mary Uni in London and I bought one of the earlier production cape, now sittign in my DIY elettronic box.
Unfortunately I have not been able to buy a beaglebone black to try it as it seems out of stock everywhere to buy for UK.

Regarding modular, I remember one of the participant at the hacklab presented a project for a Eurorack module.

#9

one question:
do you think we can load monome patches into it?

#10

Thatā€™s the question really. I would guess, at the moment, probably yes, but with difficulty. Much in the same way that you can load ā€œmonomeā€ patches onto an Aleph. (not Max patches)

#11

thanks Rodrigo.
I assume that as PD vanilla do not have osc communications, we might not be able to use itā€¦but you never know.

I shall find a beaglebone black.
Do you know where I can buy in UK?
Street retailers I guess as the distributors are all out of stock.

#12

Iā€™m not seeing udpsend and udpreceive unfortunately. They are part of the mrpeach externals for Pd, so not part of vanilla.
https://enzienaudio.com/docs/pdobjects.html

#13

Crazy question: how hard/possible would it be to write alternative firmware for the monome grid? Been wondering a bit lately if OSC is really ideal for this kind of thingā€¦

(so many situations where I wish USB MIDI was something monome could do)

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#14

Wow, amazing stuff, thanks for sharing !

#15

Iā€™ve been thinking about how to get monome grid talking to common lisp on my beaglebone & came to conclusion that osc is the wrong glue for embedded device running a single application & better to address the serial port directly using ffi to a C library.

I checked out libmonome it seems to work but couldnā€™t get it to do varibright. Canā€™t be hard to add that feature to libmonome. Similarly never wrote a pd external myself but sounds like a libmonome external for pd would not be difficultā€¦

EDIT also would like a pd external for bees - most of the code is there on aleph side (also working on serial callbacks from bees outs right now)

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#16

You could also try sticking an Arduino that has host and device USB ports in between the Monome and a computer to translate for you (or even run a simple app)

#17

Hmm I wonder will the proprietrary pd->C compiler even allow you to use ā€˜unsupportedā€™ externals like native monome serial support or link with aleph? Iā€™d guess not - they specifically say on the site ā€˜make sure you are not using any unsupported objectsā€™.

Given that they got an EPSRC grant for ā€œHackable Instrumentsā€ making vanilla pd itself totally unhackable is pretty crass. But still intrigued by the Xenomai/coprocessor implementation - dang Iā€™m so tornā€¦

#18

I asked the Bela folks about UDP support and this was the response:

Hi Jason,
We may add support for UDP in the future, either using Pd Vanillaā€™s netsend/netreceive objects or using bespoke receive/send symbols (which is how we currently handle MIDI). In the meantime UDP networking is possible with Heavy by writing a custom C++ wrapper that interfaces with the compiled patch.
Thanks,
Chris from the Bela team

This sounds like a promising direction to investigate.

I agree that Enzein Audioā€™s repositories seemā€¦ incomplete.

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#19

Heā€™s not going to release source any time soon:

http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2014-03/106287.html

Heavy audio is obviously a Queen Maryā€™s spin-off so I would be digging around to find out how open is the rest of their stack before parting with my seventy quid. However since the hardware designers probably are heavy audio I potentially donā€™t see an issue supporting their organisation. Iā€™ve been fretting over non-existance of this piece of hardware for years - only last friday I was sitting around poking an i2s bus into my beaglebone (& failing to hook it into alsa)ā€¦

We as a community could try to loudly & publicly boycott the non-free parts of their software toolchain to at least try to shame them into releasing source. Thereā€™s also this:

but, according to the author, ā€œThis is totally half-baked test code, if you couldnā€™t tellā€¦ā€ By the way anyone know the capabilities of libpd? I guess libpd allows dynamic loading, whereas the heavy-audio software statically compiles everything much as we were talking about for bees on modular firmwareā€¦

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#20

Iā€™ll definitely be interested in exploring alternatives to Heavy once I get the board.