OWL on Akso, why not?

OWL Firmware
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#1

So, this has arrived and I’m thinking about making 2020 the year of STM H7 ports of OWL.

Compared to Daisy it has:

  • half of SDRAM (but 32M is still plenty)
  • 2Mb flash vs 128k + 8M on QSPI chip (less, but I’d say sufficient - and it’s much easier to deal with compared to QSPI)
  • +20% higher MCU frequency
  • way more available pins
  • can be used with ±5V signals
  • DC coupled
  • x2+ times more expensive (Daisy: $30 + $20 shipping, Akso: $89 + free shipping)
  • USB fully functional host (Daisy has pins for this, but no device so far supports USB host with additional ICs for power)
  • SD card reader (again, Daisy has pins - but at least it’s been added to some devices including Patch)
  • codec has usable functions configured via I2C, Daisy uses a fairly dumb one (but at least it sounds great)
#2

Not exactly my area of expertise… But…
Why not axoloti on owl… The axo software seems a no compromise fit for OWL compared to all the sacrifices you have to make to compile a pure data patch for owl…
I love my owl, but I’m sticking to the supplied patches because of the hassle… It it would use axoloti… That would be great!

#3

Very simple - I’m just not very interested in making patches with Axoloti. Tried it before and didn’t enjoy the process too much.

If I wanted to use Axoloti environment, I’d consider converting it into eurorack module, it’s much easier to do that compared to porting firmware to a new device. Especially with Akso. But we don’t have an official device with MCU that fast for OWL in official devices yet (up to x4 faster compared to current OWL2 board), that’s why I’m experimenting with other hardware for now.

As for PD patches - I thought that it’s half broken and generally use C++ or Faust. However, after checking out Fascination Machine patches shared here in web patcher, I’ve changed my opinion. PD can give pretty impressive results too in the right hands.

#4

I guess I’ll have to dive into faust :slight_smile: lockdown is coming again. might be a good time to take it up. Still looking for a good FAUST for OWL tutorial though.
I did some converting Axos to Eurorack, but the format was not ideal.
My AKSO is on the way, it is indeed a eurorack device, solving that problem.

#5

Are you saying that my tutorial for Faust on OWL is not a good one? :slight_smile: Ok, it’s not really a tutorial, just documentation for all the features that are unique for OWL.

So the idea is that you would just go through official Faust docs. Once you’re familiar with the language, you’ll just need to check that reference for porting your patches.

And I’ve made a script for uploading those sample patches, so it can be used to quickly test that everything works when adding something to OWL Faust plugin code itself.

#6

Well I wasn’t aware :slight_smile:
Would that work on the OWL Modular or is that Magus only? What would I declare “PLATFORM” as in that case?
Looks like I know what to do later today :slight_smile:

#7

You may have to change some things on different devices, but core principals are the same and patches are often compatible. For example, on Magus you can use 20 paramaters configured as hardware inputs on outputs. On Owl you can’t do that, but you patch will still run and the values that you set to “output” can still be read back in patch itself. You just can’t control anything outside you patch with CV this way. OTOH, Magus doesn’t have button that you could use, and so on.

You don’t need to set PLATFORM variable for Owl, because it’s already used as default value. But if you want to know, it’s compiling them as PLATFORM=OWL .