[chuck-users] EChucK Forum and Progress Update

[Les Hall]

Hello ChucKists!

I'd like to announce that we just created an EChucK forum right next to 
the ChucK forum on www.electro-music.com.  I was really surprised and 
happy with this especially since the project is still in its infancy.  
Some updates:

I bought a netbook running XP (love it!), which now enables me to run 
the microchip MPLAB IDE so I can now write code for the EChucK dsPIC 
chips.  After extensive learning curve of a few days I was able to 
write a simple little program that generates a square wave.  I still 
don't have chips or a programmer, but that will happen in time.

I also finally figured out how to cut up the EChucK circuit boards that 
I've had for months now into the little bitty boards that are the basis 
of EChucK.  I used a Dremel tool with a diamond cutting wheel in a 
rickety drill press stand and thus created a very crude sort of 
horizontal PCB table saw.  It worked pretty well, though some of the 
cuts were a little too close.  I cut one board up for experimentation 
and left the other three intact.

Also on the www.justinguitar.com forum, the other day I was mentioning 
EChucK and the possibility of doing guitar synth stuff with it.  It 
turns out that one of the moderators there is looking for that "Matt 
Belamy of Muse" guitar sound and wants me to make us both a little mini 
guitar pedal.  We decided to code up a test file in ChucK first, which 
I did with AGC followed by soft distortion to get something like the 
sound that he wanted.  So it looks like after the square wave program, 
the first real application of EChucK will be to implement a ChucK 
program for guitar synth.

That's about it for now.  Please feel free to stop by the EChucK forum 
or view the EChucK web page at www.freedomodds.com/music/echuck/ .

Les
(Inventor)