I am proud owner of a home audio studio, but it has a big flaw: hardware is not open source. You may think it’s not a big deal, but once you want to alter something, you realize you’re stuck. Let me explain. My mixer is digital and you control it over some other device (computer, or android based device). It’s a nice feature, and it has USB connection, so it can act as an audio interface. The problem with that is 48kHz sampling, which is OK for live gigs, but not so much for studio recordings. On the other hand, I have audio interface with 96kHz sampling, but it can not work as stand alone mixer. To be honest, I don’t know anything about DSP and embeded programming, but I said to myself “I know I can do better than this”. That’s how “the ride” began.

Since then I really wanted to make Arduino Due working, but for some reason GCC on FreeBSD gave a faulty binary. Back then I was desperate and I knew there is absolutely no way I can fix the issue with the compiler. Hell, I couldn’t even use it as developer, let alone debug it. So there came Clang/LLVM.

In one of the previous posts I wrote about compiling blink LED test with Clang. That gave me hope that FreeBSD might be the perfect platform for me for embeded programming. As my end goal is to create a digital mixer with proper sampling rate, I knew from the begining I can not just write any code. It must be real time and optimized really good. I’ve got to be honest with you: there are two obstacles for me to write such a code. First one is that Arduino libraries are not optimal. I didn’t check, but I do have friends who are professional embeded programmers who told me that. Second one is that I’m system administrator. You can not imagine the desparation of a sys admin staring at the board which doesn’t blink.

Now for the good part. I discovered NuttX. A friend in Tilda hackerspace asked me how do I search for such cool things, and the only answer I had was “gut feeling”. Later I discovered that even Sony is using it for audio in some of their products. Even better, they use C++11, which is like a scripting language compared to “plain” C++ I used back in 2008. When I say “used” it’s an overstatement. I think more apropriate phrase would be “I played with it”. So, I made my goal to make NuttX compile with Clang, and I made it. You can check out my fork for now, until the patch makes it into the official repository. Although I used FreeBSD for development, I hope it’s generic enough to be used on other OSes which Clang/LLVM supports. It still lacks LLVM libc++ support, and that’s what we’ll be working on in the hackerspace today (Tuesday it’s embeded programming day) and in the future.

So, the final product will be digital mixer which can be controlled over network based on NuttX, Clang, Nucleo F401RE, and Cirus Logic DAC / ADC. The DAC/ADC choice was made by a new found friend from France I will talk about in some of the next posts (tramendesly interesting guy) who also wrote audio and midi server for NuttX.