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written by: barnone

Great news on imminent open sourcing John.

This will be a very important milestone and fulfillment of the original promise which I thank you for.



written by: jsn

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:56:23 +0100 BST

I recently was given a Pico which I love! However, I feel there are a few bits of missing software which would make it much more accessible to the untrained musician - such as myself. As a professional software developer I would happily write them and publish them freely, however, I find there is no documentation about reading/writing to EigenD from other software.

Any chance of some docs, or preferably examples? I'm willing to lend a hand if pointed in the right direction.

Please open the architecture up to guys like me!

Let me be clear: I am not asking you to open-source EigenD, I just want some API/protocol access so I can read/set values through software


written by: john

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:41:49 +0100 BST

We are about to opensource the software for real under the GPL. We have been wanting to do this for ages, but pressure of time has held us up. This should be sometime in the next few weeks now as I do feel that its about time we did what we said we were going to do over a year ago. It's mostly a matter of putting all the licence stuff in the source files and getting the GIT repository in shape. This is really boring work so it's hard to find the motivation. There will be a contributor agreement (like Ubuntu's). Feel free to nag me about this, I was in fact literally just thinking about it when I saw your post in a nice piece of synchronicity ...

In the meantime, if you want to set values you can do this via OSC using the Stage interface in the latest 1.3 Testing release. Build yourself a tab with whatever values you want to twiddle with and they are then controllable via OSC. I don't think that this is documented yet, although I know that some players have used it by inspecting the Stage XML config (which you can export as a file). If we get time this week we'll add some info to the Wiki on how to talk to controls that you have created from third party software. Our eventual ambition is that all of EigenD will use OSC, not just Stage.

John



written by: ZaPPZion

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:27:45 +0100 BST

Just a quick question being a software developer myself as well, will I be able to access all code? I'd love to be able to read/write to the i2c bus for example, to be able to connect some pedals to the standard base station, that'd be awesome


written by: Tenebrous

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:45:50 +0100 BST

Ooooh, that's great news John :)


written by: john

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 23:17:58 +0100 BST

Hi ZaPPZion

No, not everything is going GPL. Stage (the GUI app) won't for example, but the whole core of the system will. You will be able to build an EigenD from it.

Sadly the I2C bus on the back of the Basestation Pro currently lacks VHDL in the silicon in the actual Basestation itself. That VHDL is monumentally scary to work on (it does a lot of stuff including a pile of DSP and the whole error recovering serial link) but if you're good at VHDL I'm certainly willing to talk to you about it. You do need to be pretty good at VHDL though - its not for the faint hearted. We may get to putting that bus through the serial link next year, but it's not a trivial piece of work.


John


written by: jsn

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:16:14 +0100 BST

Thanks for the quick response, John. I look forward to the open-source release. Please feel free to ask for guinea-pigs to do test builds.

I will look at the OSC with Stage, but I would really prefer to have just EigenD running.

Can I repeat my request for examples first, before the docs? Having run software teams and delivered product for more than a decade, I've found a good example is worth 2000+ words of documentation - especially as devs tend to dislike writing docs and can compile/test examples. I don't know a developer who wouldn't start with code by preference.

As for VHDL, I do know it and have built with it - but I know what you mean about it being hairy. It always is. However, if someone wants to give me a Tau/Alpha I'll give it a go :-)


written by: jsn

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:17:16 +0100 BST

...that should say "I don't know a developer who wouldn't start with the examples by preference".

Duh...figured out how to edit a post. Changed it.


written by: barnone

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 01:04:56 +0100 BST

Great news on imminent open sourcing John.

This will be a very important milestone and fulfillment of the original promise which I thank you for.





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