Hi guys. What's the status on open sourcing the software?
Even just a rough breakdown of how to talk to an eigenharp to read control data would be great.
written by: andrewr
Hi John, thanks for the reply.Hi guys. What's the status on open sourcing the software?
Even just a rough breakdown of how to talk to an eigenharp to read control data would be great.
I'm curious about this, I can't wait to dig deeper into EigenD's code !
The last I heard about this was a paragraph in Johns long reply to this thread of mine a few weeks back:
http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/threads/id/491/
Based on what he said Im not anticipating it happening till after November.
I see.
I don't really know what's involved with reading and writing data from an eigenharp. However, if it's possible to get some basic functionality without having to know how the entire system works, I can get the ball rolling on a clean-room implementation of a C library for communicating with eigenharps (I have a Tau.)
I would need information that only Eigenlabs possesses right now, though, because reverse engineering from scratch would be very painful.
I too would be very interested in having Eigenlabs release enough specifics to allow us to make a device driver for, say, Linux.
Still eagerly awaiting some kind of information on how to talk to an eigenharp. C'mon guys!
Hi Andrew
We will not be releasing the wire protocol specifications. This protocol gets changed from time to time, and is shared with the Pico. We have some fairly major IP issues with this as there is some significant code in the Pico driver that we cannot release (I've posted on this subject before). The drivers will as a result be remaining proprietary for now.
Your best way in and out of the Eigenharp will certainly be via OSC in the near future. As an aside, we do have the system running on Linux anyway (its what we use internally in the factory for testing them in fact), but we don't have it low latency enough to be happy about releasing it yet. I'll ask Jim about status on that next week and get back to you.
John
Hi John, thanks for the reply.
A powerful OSC transport would indeed be enough. My idea is to play the Tau slightly differently from how it is currently. Notes would be fingered on the neck and then sounded by striking what are currently used as percussion keys.
Off the top of my head, the most powerful way to get data out of an Eigenharp would be for each possible control value (obviously there are a huge number of these) to get sent to an OSC address as simply an int32 or float.
I don't know how much of the "turn control data into logical notes" gets done on the Eigenharp hardware itself. From the descriptions I've seen so far, I would assume for the Pico, more of it is done on the PC software side. For the Alpha and Tau, more of it is done on the instrument/base station.
If you are just wanting as much power for programming as possible, it makes sense to preserve as much data as possible when bringing it to OSC. The data would more closely map to what is physically being pressed and done with the instrument. This is less useful for people who just want to play notes or send control data to OSC-enabled software or devices, so it would need a more practical mode as well.
Well, I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here. But a powerful OSC feature would be the perfect solution.
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