#10

maaaaaybe but:

  • yes, it runs off 5V; but it’s a moderately fragile bit of kit. You don’t want any 12V near it. If you screw up, you’ll probably fry the Pi - it’s not as aggressive about protecting its pins as an old-style Arduino.
  • it has no ADCs in; its GPIO pins can only handle digital data. So you’re going to end up having to add on ADCs to handle pots, CV/gate in. And as you do that, what you’re essentially doing is building a really big microcontroller that’s a bit fragile. The 0 is interesting because it’s so cheap, but I’ve still found Teensys or similar more cost effective as actual dev microcontroller platforms.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is its card slot: you could have a bank of SD cards much like cartridges, to change out functionality.

I do like being able to write high level language stuff on them, but they’re often a bit crankier than a real microcontroller. Also, just getting stuff to run on boot and stay up is a thing you’ll have to solve; I wrote this a few years ago about how to run stuff via upstart, based on experience building an installation artwork around one.

I’d just be concerned about stability, for a Euro dev platform. (And I say this as someone who’d rather write Ruby or Javascript than C).

3 Likes
#11

Really excellent feedback. Thank you very much.

#12

I mean, it’d still be interesting as a thing to experiment with - cf the circuit abbey Euroduino - and the idea of a module that Does PD is interesting. But I’d emphasise it as a platform for experimenting, rather than building a commercial product around per se.

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#13

I need to figure out what The Owl and the Qu-bit Nebulae are based on. They both run Pd, and the Nebulae also runs CSound.

#14

Nebulae is a Pi - the schematics and code are open source. (In fact, it’s a Pi, an Arduino, and not much else: the Arduino does all UI/analog reads, and talks MIDI to the Pi. This is a common pattern I’ve seen, using the microcontroller to do interfacing, and then spitting nice serial data to a Pi. It just feels a bit clunky to me.)

Not sure about OWL. The Organelle isn’t a Pi, but is another ARM System on a Chip, it looks like.

Don’t take my wariness as a “no” - other people would say yes! Give me enough time and I’d probably talk myself into it. I’m just wary of building everything out of Pis, and I’m also wary of a eurorack module with a 30s boot-up time.

2 Likes
#15

30s bootup is a real drag.

#16

Via this muffwiggler thread, here is a paper about building a CSound machine out of a Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno, which is a very similar rig to the Nebulae.

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#17

@jasonw22 Downloaded on my phone today to have a play around will definitely benefit from a stylus (small phone real estate!!)

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#18

I’ve been having so much fun with music apps on iOS. I can’t believe I’ve never seen sunvox

#19

i’ve also been researching the pi and SoC stuff a lot recently. it’s insane how cheaply this stuff is and begs to be integrated into products. unfortunately none of them really fit perfectly for me. and one big thing i’ve been trying to get over is latency optimization. the i2s is great (hifiberry sounds good, i have one) but there’s lot of hacking to be done to get it working well (ie, supercollider without jack??)

also, this is what you’re looking for:

https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=104896&start=all&postdays=0&postorder=asc

also: chip from http://nextthing.co/ is super cool, but the R7 doesn’t have i2s.

2 Likes
#20

yeah - it’s all those fine details that are easy to gloss over in prototyping / dreaming, but then hit hard when you’re making an actual object/instrument that people are going to use. And that’s why my gut is hesitant above - not because there aren’t loads of people with working, home-made whatevers in laser-cut cases, but because of all the unknown unknowns.

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#21

Worth noting that perhaps more interesting for integration, from a hardware perspective, is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module which is designed exactly for that.

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#22

yes the compute module was my intention. however, it’s annoying that the compute module is $40 whereas the zero is $5.

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#23

Just saw this:

#24

sadly those pwm outputs sound like absolute garbage.

2 Likes
#25

Yeah. On an old Pi I’m using as a streaming server, I’m using a Wolfson audio card, but I doubt there’s anything like that for the RPi Zero yet.

#26

hifiberry should work given the zero is pin-compatible with the pi2. not sure about the wolfson.

#27

I’m trying to find an eagle file (or something) for the terminal tedium pcb and having no luck. I’m missing something…

#28

https://github.com/mxmxmx/terminal_tedium/tree/master/hardware:panel/gerbers ?

1 Like
#29

Perfect! Thank you very much.