Electrosmith's Daisy

[ricard]

You don’t wanna listen to a -24dBFS sine wave at 12bit,

Well, properly dithered, a -24 dBFS sine wave at 12 bit will sound just fine, although the noise floor will be noticeable.

But that's not really my point, rather it is that in these days of 24 bit DACs, 12 bit is often classed as decidedly "lo-fi". But properly managed, it can sound fine, as many older digital instruments prove. I'm not suggesting that they sound better than modern systems, just saying that a 12 bit DAC could sound fine in 1983, and it can in 2020 too if needed.

[SmashedTransistors]

Quantization with a fixed sampling rate and quantization with a variable sampling rate do not generate the same kind of artefacts. With fixed sampling rate you get non harmonic digital noise, with pitch related sampling rate, you get overtones which are much nicer.

[SmashedTransistors]

I started to really experiment with the Daisy seed last week.

The board itself is quite powerful but it has some issues that the Axoloti does not have.

• The most irritating one is a constant 1kHz hiss on the audio output that is related to cyclic MCU digital noise bursts and ground loops. This can be suppressed by using a ground loop isolator (HD400 or clones of HD400).
• On the raw "daisy seed" you have to add your own MIDI input with an optocoupler. As there is no regulated 5V available you have to choose your optocoupler wisely. I opted for the H11L1 as it can operate at 3V3.

The Daisy does not have a single dev environment but many software environments... I'm not sure it is a good idea.
Anyway, i chose the Daisyduino environment so that i can use some Arduino MIDI library.

When I first experimented I had the same performances as the Axoloti even if the Daisy runs at 400MHz (VS 168MHz) !

By searching the daisy forum and asking questions, it appears that cache was disabled for some "past bug reason" and that it was still not re-enabled in the daisyduino environment... thus, i did some mods manually to get it work.
Now I have about 2,5x the cpu power of the axoloti.

About instrumentation and experimentation...the compilation time/upload is very slow compared with the Axoloti. When it runs, the daisy only communicates with the PC through a arduino serial console... you can forget the useful Axoloti's scope and other displays and the real time parameter adjustments.

In brief - put aside the board x2.5 cpu power - the Axoloti is far more advanced, mature and reliable than the Daisy.

But, as i sadly have now visibility on the future of Axoloti and Akso i'm switching - at least for the moment - to the Daisy Seed.

[tele_player]

That's a good summary, though I've reached a diffierent conclusion.

First, Daisy has too many development systems, and none of them is complete. My guess - Daisy needs more SW engineers.

Next, for me, the 1Khz noise is a show-stopper. Seems to me that Daisy was designed by amateurs, or just inadequately tested. Or worse, they decided it didn't matter. Note: running on battery also eliminates the noise. BUT, in my opinion, the Seed should be quiet under all power conditions, without requiring external devices.

[SmashedTransistors]

As long as neither the Akso nor the Axoloti are regularly available i will be looking for alternatives.

Another issue i forgot to mention about the Daisy is the lack of MIDI USB support . The daisy is around for almost a year and such a mandatory feature is not yet available.

[reubenfinger]

I understand, but feel utter terror that such an active and talented programmer is having his head turned by this Daisy floozy....she's not good enough for you Smash, her lack of usb midi support is indicative of her ultimately cold heart......

As long as neither the Akso nor the Axoloti are regularly available i will be looking for alternatives.

wish it weren't so but, yes developers who create Ax or Aks related hardware do seem to be stricken with radio silence, I hope it's not a new viral variant in the codebase

[tele_player]

Daisy just isn’t ready, and may never be ready. They did a good job of promoting with Kickstarter, promises, and a nice website.

Electrosmith hasn’t made any comment on the 1khz buzz, which isn’t encouraging.

I wish Paul Stoffregen would make a Teensy4 with a well-implemented codec on board.

[hitachii]

Curious to know what it would take to get the Axoloti Patcher up and running on a more up to date microcontroller. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a collaborative initiative to do so yet.

While the hardware like the MIDI din, stereo jacks, etc. are other matters entirely, I think that making the patcher available on a newer chip alone would boost the Axoloti project to a wider audience who could potentially add those things later. Someone in another thread converted their PreenFM2 since it's the same chip, so I'm curious if that extrapolates to something like the i.MX RT1060, so you could plug-and-play with a Teensy 4.x.

Those on this forum may know that my programming journey literally began with the Axo arriving in the mail, so the idea might be absurd, but the Axoloti has really changed my entire philosophy on hardware in a way that I feel should be taken into a new generation, so I had to ask.

There's so much love and energy put into the objects of this thing, I just think that it's within the realm of possibility to direct that energy towards the platform itself, as a community.

[tele_player]

Akso is exactly that, Axoloti on a much faster STM32. Unfortunately, it’s creator, Nic (urklang on this forum) has stopped communicating.

[SmashedTransistors]

That's the dilemma between what we ideally want and what is practically available.

If the axoloti core is not available, i can use my remaining axoloti core for prototyping and use daisies for the implementation. Thus, @reubenfinger i will continue to develop objects for the Axoloti... and implement them on the daisy.

I guess it is quite a complicated time for everybody including Nic and Johannes.

I hope they will be able to resume their projects.