Switching MCU Horses in Mid-stream & an UnConventional Experience

I just returned home from a trip to Princeton where I met with Jeff Snyder and to New York, where I attended two days of the first annual Steel Guitar UnConvention at the Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn and had the chance to see, among others, Susan Alcorn, Doug Jernigan, and Lucky Oceans.

First, the meeting with Jeff Snyder. Jeff and his associates had just finished porting Katja Vetter's pitch-shifting algorithm, which was originally written for Puredata. (I had used one instance of Katja's Pd abstractions for each of ten strings in the Proof of Concept instrument.) The idea was to port the code to OOPS, an open-source C library specifically intended for embedded systems. Jeff had been looking for a good pitch-shifting implementation to include in his library and Katja graciously gave her permission for her algo to be used in such an open source software project. I get to use the library for the OnePSG. A win-win-win.

During my visit, I heard a test, on an STM32F7 processor, of the first version of the port wherein two sine waves were shifted successfully. We've decided to switch to the STM32H7, a high performance version of the F7 processor, and that will be the next bit of work. Also while there, Jeff took me through the ins and outs of the toolchain and also kindly gave me a custom eval board he'd built for the F7 and the library.

For the OnePSG, for consistency of development environment, we've decided to use the STM32H7 not just for the DSP processors but also for the main control unit (replacing the Arduino Mega2560).

And so, there's lots of work ahead for me, testing various features of the control code and UI code with the STM and testing communication between the control STM and the several DSP STMs. Then, rewriting a good bit of code that has already been developed for the STM.

At the Steel Guitar UnConvention, I got to see some great performances and meet some old and new friends. I talked to Daniel, who is doing his PhD on pedal steel builders. Fascinating. Susan Alcorn introduced me to Lucky Oceans who had heard about the OnePSG from Jim Palenscar. Of course, Lucky grokked the thing immediately and as we talked, he came up with some interesting ideas I had not thought about (we'll be continuing our conversation for sure). A great experience all around.