Why only four user slots?

OWL
#1

I already have more than four custom patches, and a lot of the factory patches (e.g. reverb) aren’t that useful to me as a bass player, or are pretty close to commercial effects.

Is there some underlying reason for the four-slot limitation? If I fork OwlWare, set MAX_FACTORY_PATCHES to 0 and MAX_USER_PATCHES to 40, and then manage everything using FirmwareSender, will I brick my OWL?

I understand that I can modify OwlWare’s patch registry to load my patches into the factory slots, but I don’t want to have to flash the whole system every time I add a patch.

#2

There is a reason: the Flash memory on the device, 1Mb in total, is divided into 128kb sectors. We currently use the last four sectors to store one user preset per sector, regardless of size.

What would be much nicer is to have minimalist filesystem to store presets and other resources, e.g. samples. Then any number of user patches (most are < 64kb) and other stuff could be stored as long as the total size is not exceeded.

Problem is that with flash memory you can only delete entire sectors, so removing or replacing a patch becomes a little bit complicated.

I’ve been working on this functionality since some time… There’s a dev branch in OwlWare, and it is also part of the new OpenWare firmware.

OpenWare is planned as the next gen firmware for OWL and some new devices we’re working on. I’ve not got any exciting news regarding OpenWare at the moment, the code isn’t very mature and doesn’t yet work with the OWL codec. But we’re actively developing it, and it is a key part of the roadmap!

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the info–that all makes good sense. I will plan on making my own “factory” set for now.

#4

Generic long-term question about the OWL platform: How many erase-write cycles does the Flash support?

#5

I believe it’s guaranteed to 10,000 erase cycles.
Another advantage with the file storage approach is that patches could be updated without erase: simply mark a block as deleted and wait to remove until space runs out. Disadvantage: risk of data corruption is much greater!