Re: [chuck-users] Electronic ChucK
OK, regarding cost concerns, I have thought this out a little but have not done thorough cost estimation. A SqrOsc can be made with a 555 chip, four resistors and two caps plus two connectors. That's only about five dollars in parts, most of it in the dang connectors. Gain block? put four of them on a single board for not much more. A general purpose, PIC processor based unit would be about the same or maybe two dollars more. Remember, Arduino is a big chip with lots of support components, while the smaller of the PIC family cost $2 and are a total system on a chip. In fact, most of the cost is in the screw-type terminals so if we were to make the system be solderable with just vias (holes) for terminals, the cost per UGen goes down to just $2 on average. And with surface mount parts the board size for a UGen goes down to about the size of a postage stamp so you get *many* UGens on a full-size board. As to closely following ChucK, this is a good point. I imagine that if this catches on, other people will create all sorts of UGens that are not constrained by ChucK at all. I had originally envisioned it months ago as a free-form system in which you can build any module that works, and it was only this morning in the wee hours that I got the inspiration to model it after ChucK. So yeah, it will probably get way different from ChucK in practice if it ever happens. I don't know what direction to take it, but I tell you what. I'm working on it. I'm using Eagle CAD to draw up some basic initial UGens. I am completing the first one, which is a battery power module, and I'm not worrying about making it perfect or adding a wall-wart jack or anything like that. I figure the early modules will get abandoned over time so they are just to get *something* up and running to start with, and they will all get replaced anyway. One cool thing is that the modules are so simple that the freeware version of Eagle can be used to design and manufacture them. I'd like to begin establishing some standards that are not written in stone, but are recommended guidelines. Let's discuss these standards and I'll start a web page for all to read up on the whole thing. The standards are: 1. Use Eagle CAD 2. +5V single supply power 3. analog and digital signals swing from gnd to +5V 4. artificial ground is +2.5V That's all I have so far. I am happy to see the responses to my messages, this is getting to be fun (which is the whole idea)! Cheers! Les (Inventor)
Les; OK, regarding cost concerns, I have thought this out a little but have not
done thorough cost estimation. A SqrOsc can be made with a 555 chip, four resistors and two caps plus two connectors.
Well, yes, if all you want is to go "beep". Oscillators in modular systems need a CV input for tracking; making sure that adding (typically) a extra Volt of modulation signal will double the frequency of the oscillator. This is hard to get stable for larger ranges. A CMOS chip like the 555 needs to be protected against getting inputs above it's power input or it will fry. SqrOsc features like phase mod/output, hard-sync, FM modulation and a freq input are all available in hardware modules but those aren't cheap modules and none of those come close to the stability in tuning and tracking of this very modest UGen. If you start making very cheap modules so people will buy large stacks of them to build long signal chains you'll need especially high quality modulation inputs because the longer the chain the more the errors will add up. Errors here will mean out of tune chords, for example. For oscillators you could use those cheap chips they used to use in telephone modems; those will do unusually stable FM over a huge frequency range; I'd go with those here but that doesn't get you off the hook for modulated filters. My main reason for being sceptical about the practical feasibility of this is that people have tried it many times. Nearly all synthesis fanatics would like a system like the one you propose. Right now I think the cheapest series of modules on the market is made by the German company Doepfer; their modules will still set you back a few hundred bucks for the equivalent of a simple monosynth and I keep hearing about issues with their usage of relatively cheap connectors which will develop loose connections with use. Again; I love this idea as a dream but I fear that if it could be done it would've been done already. I'd say the core of your plan is to represent signal flow as a 3d structure, right? I'd recommend going back to that and using a visual or physical representation of ChucK code in something like the Reactable or the Percussa Audiocubes. To bring this back to the subject of ChucK; I'm not sure people realise that our young, incomplete, at times computationally ineficient and occasionally crash-prone language is immensenly stable and unfathomably powerfull compared to hardware modulars. Yours, Kas.**
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