Where do I find tech specs, firmware notes etc?

OWL
#1

Hello!
Just got my hands on an owl pedal mk1 second hand, super cool stuff. Right away, I created a pretty huge Faust program and tried to load it, but it didn’t work…

I then read somewhere on github that the owl mk1 could only handle patches that were less than 64kb in size, and my patch was 139kb. And then I came to think, it would be useful to see an actual list of firmware notes, and also just tech specs in general. I can’t find much info about the Owl Pedal mk1 at all, just random bits of information scattered around on the internet.

#2

The starting point for OWL docs is here, but it likely won’t answer your question.

So for OWL1 you had a limitation of 64kb per patch on the legacy firmware that was written for that pedal (or its modular version) only. It wasn’t updated for many years, since a new firmware was written that supports 2 newer generation of OWL hardware in addition to OWL1. If your install that firmware, OWL1 can utilize up to 80kb which is a small improvement.

139kb is kind of big, how exactly are you measuring it?

Potentially you could reduce binary size if you compile you patch manually patch and change compiler options to optimize for minimal size (at the cost of potentially reducing performance).

For reference, OWL2 supports patches up to 144kb in size, while OWL3 is again back to 80kb but has an option to use 512kb if you build patches manually with a special flag enabled. Those limitations are due to microcontrollers used and are required in order to keep binary compatibility with previously build patches on newer hardware.

#3

Thanks! Good to know. I’m still very new to programming, so I don’t know exactly how to measure the size. But I figured something was very wrong as the pedal started blinking red and chrome froze so I checked the size of the sysex, and it was 139kb.

Perhaps I’m trying to do something too ambitious - I want to have a single patch that is a self contained multi-fx system. So lot’s of dsp crammed into one patch, pretty much.

#4

Sysex size is about 15% bigger than patch size, but that would still be ~120kb. It sounds like you should try to use fewer effects and gradually add more, while tracking CPU/memory/patch size available.

#5

Think I figured out the biggest problem: reverb. When I removed it, the file size was reduced by half

But anyway, is there really no concise documentation for all this stuff? The absence of documentation makes it quite difficult for a beginner like me… Patch size limits feels like very essential info to put in the quick start guide, for example