About 2.5 years ago, during the Open Source Bridge Conference, I was telling some friends about a new plan I had. I wanted to build a little standalone audio processor board around an ARM processor, probably the STM32F4, and then put a LADSPA container on it for effects processing. Fun project… My awesome friend Jared Boone listened patiently to my plan, and then said: "I think you just want to build this", and then handed me a bare board he had designed which was more or less exactly what I wanted. "I have a spare set of parts also: I'll get them to you." He calls the board the "ardio" and it really is neat.
OK. Later I'm telling my awesome friend Corbin Simpson about this and I say "Now all I need is a compositing LADSPA container." Corbin tells me that he's already written one, and it's on Github. Check.
This is the genesis of Summer Hardware Project. Fast forward two summers in which I fail to build out the board. I tried last summer, and screwed it up so bad I had to wipe the board and start over. A month or so ago I tried again, and only got two-thirds of the parts stuffed before my time ran out. My awesome friend Andrew Greenberg finished it for me. Then I broke the USB connector off the board in an unfortunate incident involving stray epoxy. My awesome friend Keith Packard repaired the connector, and I managed to successfully epoxy it back down on the board so that it seems to be permanent.
SHP works now. Or at least I can see that its CPU runs.
I've spent the last few days experimenting with NuttX on a stock STM32F4 Discovery board, using a Debian ARM toolchain that Keith Packard put together. I now kind of know how to work with the embedded environment.
Next step: figure out the final software configuration, and start trying to put the software together.
There's more to come, but I'm starting to finally make progress.
Thank you, all my awesome friends. (B)