ornament & crime beta testing

DirkB

DirkB

Member
is there any way to get hold of PCB and other necessary HW parts for beta testing the Phazerville fork of O_c with a Teensy 4?
 
If you just want to try Phazerville firmware on Teensy 4, all you need is a normal (not VOR) version of the Ornament and Crime boards... with Teensy 3.2 installed in a socket. (sadly, it seems many were built with Teensy 3.2 hard soldered). If the PCB has a pogo pin that touches the reset pad on Teensy 3.2, cover it with tape so it doesn't touch the bottom side of Teensy 4.0. Then just unplug the Teensy 3.2 and plug in a Teensy 4.0 and program it with the Phazerville firmware. However, other than getting all the apps / applets in a single firmware image, there's not a lot of reason to use Teensy 4.0 on those old PCBs if you already have hardware with Teensy 3.2.

But if you're asking about beta testing the new PCB design I've been working on recently, which is optimized for Teensy 4.1, at this moment you'll have to wait. The first PCB rev has a few minor but important issues, so I haven't sent PCBs to anyone yet, not even to DJ Phazer. Sadly, I lost momentum on it a couple weeks ago when the old forum server hardware crashed. While I got the forum back up with new software on a new server in only a couple days (restored from a daily SQL dump backup), many minor issues with the new forum (and dealing with the onslaught of spammers) have taken quite a bit of my attention for these last couple weeks.

Much work remains on the software side before this new hardware can become usable. If you look at my Phazerville fork, you can see I started working on auto-detection of the PCB and edits to Phazerville's drivers for encoders and trigger edge detection. Not visiable on github at this time is a lot of earlier work for test code to use FlexIO for the 16 bit ADC chip and 8:1 mux, and similar code to initialize the new DAC chip. I hope to get back to Ornament and Crime stuff by the weekend, to ideally get the rest of the PCB tested well enough that I can confidently order another set of PCBs.

So a best case scenario is looking like another PCB rev in a couple weeks (but a worst case could be much slower). If I'm happy with the next PCB, the very first will go to DJ Phazer since he's actively maintaining the firmware. He'll probably publish YouTube video demos, so follow his channel to get notifications. When you see those demo videos, that'll be the time to ask about joining beta testing.
 
thanks a lot for your amazing efforts; i will surely keep on following Phazerville’s YT channel; wish you good luck!
 
Yes, a 2nd PCB rev was made. It's on my desk now. Unless any major problems turn up, next week I'm planning to send hardware to the authors of Phazerville and Squares & Circles. I might also send one to "mxmxmx" (the original Ornament and Crime creator) if he says he'd like early hardware. So far he hasn't replied, and my guess is he'll probably prefer to get the final version. And after building and testing this board, even if no problems turn up I probably will make a 3rd PCB rev just to add test points that make hardware troubleshooting easier.

You can also see on the Phazerville github commit log, that pull request was eventually merged and another commit went in just days ago to fix a bug (my fault). Not earth shattering news, but progress definitely is being made.
 
wow, nice to hear; me myself don’t want to buy another O_c anymore and just be patient till a new PCB is available :) fingers crossed
 
In a classic example of everything takes longer than anticipated, after I got those 2 units soldered I didn't really have a plan for how I would test them. While the Phazerville firmware now has low-level drivers for the new hardware (most of it anyway) none of the rest of the code supports it yet. After a couple false starts, I ended up hacking many lines of test code into a copy of Phazerville to print (to the Arduino Serial Monitor) all the raw ADC and other inputs, MIDI inputs, and a few commands I could send by from the serial monitor to override all DAC outputs and send a test MIDI message. I'm not a musician with a modular synth setup, so I ended up soldering several little adaptors from patch cords to my multimeter, a monitor speaker, and other stuff. It's a good thing I put this work into testing, as both of the PCB sets I hand soldered has a few places I missed.

Today those 2 hand soldered units are shipping to DJ Phazer (Phazerville firmare) and EH2K (Squares and Circles firmware).
 
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PaulStoffregen said:
In a classic example of everything takes longer than anticipated, after I got those 2 units soldered I didn't really have a plan for how I would test them. While the Phazerville firmware now has low-level drivers for the new hardware (most of it anyway) none of the rest of the code supports it yet. After a couple false starts, I ended up hacking many lines of test code into a copy of Phazerville to print (to the Arduino Serial Monitor) all the raw ADC and other inputs, MIDI inputs, and a few commands I could send by from the serial monitor to override all DAC outputs and send a test MIDI message. I'm not a musician with a modular synth setup, so I ended up soldering several little adaptors from patch cords to my multimeter, a monitor speaker, and other stuff. It's a good thing I put this work into testing, as both of the PCB sets I hand soldered has a few places I missed.

Today those 2 hand soldered units are shipping to DJ Phazer (Phazerville firmare) and EH2K (Squares and Circles firmware).
Click to expand...
how far are we now?
 
Quick followup, O_C T4.1 is now in beta testing. Here's a photo of one of the beta test units being calibrated.

oc_beta_calibration.jpg


Full open source release is likely soon, of course depending on feedback from beta testers in the coming days. But so far everything on the hardware side is looking good.

I started a sort of soft rolling release on github. Many files, including full schematic are already online.

github.com

GitHub - PaulStoffregen/O_C_T41: Ornament and Crime Optimized With Teensy 4.1

Ornament and Crime Optimized With Teensy 4.1. Contribute to PaulStoffregen/O_C_T41 development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

This project has dragged on for several months. I've been feeling a bit overly cautious about releasing to the synth vendors after we had some serious bugs in an earlier version. But rev3 solved those problems and is looking pretty good. Hopefully about a dozen beta testers will confirm in the coming days.
 
Having just fallen down the Eurorack rabbit hole ( acquiring parts, building related stuff ) I am waiting to pounce when it is ready to be pounced upon.
 
so there's this rule I've heard about, t x 1.7 or projects always take 1.7 times longer than you think :) so happy to see the "light of day" on this one!!
 
I would say 2x longer is minimum :)
In the past when I was asked to provide quote for the project I always multiplied my ballpark estimate by 2 :)
 
PaulStoffregen said:
Quick followup, O_C T4.1 is now in beta testing. Here's a photo of one of the beta test units being calibrated.

View attachment 35062

Full open source release is likely soon, of course depending on feedback from beta testers in the coming days. But so far everything on the hardware side is looking good.

I started a sort of soft rolling release on github. Many files, including full schematic are already online.

github.com

GitHub - PaulStoffregen/O_C_T41: Ornament and Crime Optimized With Teensy 4.1

Ornament and Crime Optimized With Teensy 4.1. Contribute to PaulStoffregen/O_C_T41 development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

This project has dragged on for several months. I've been feeling a bit overly cautious about releasing to the synth vendors after we had some serious bugs in an earlier version. But rev3 solved those problems and is looking pretty good. Hopefully about a dozen beta testers will confirm in the coming days.
Click to expand...
Hi Paul,
Sascha here from Northern Light Modular...
We are very much looking forward to integrate the new IC into our upcoming Polymorpher - 2OCx for the Buchla format.
Right now I am looking into implement all the input and output attenuation and level visualisation (LEDs) we had in the T3.2 model.
If you would like to provide some input regarding the hardware design , let me now :)
As for now i can share a preliminary layout which integrates the midi and usb IO found in the expanders.
 

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PaulStoffregen said:
Quick followup, O_C T4.1 is now in beta testing. Here's a photo of one of the beta test units being calibrated.

View attachment 35062

Full open source release is likely soon, of course depending on feedback from beta testers in the coming days. But so far everything on the hardware side is looking good.

I started a sort of soft rolling release on github. Many files, including full schematic are already online.

github.com

GitHub - PaulStoffregen/O_C_T41: Ornament and Crime Optimized With Teensy 4.1

Ornament and Crime Optimized With Teensy 4.1. Contribute to PaulStoffregen/O_C_T41 development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

This project has dragged on for several months. I've been feeling a bit overly cautious about releasing to the synth vendors after we had some serious bugs in an earlier version. But rev3 solved those problems and is looking pretty good. Hopefully about a dozen beta testers will confirm in the coming days.
Click to expand...
hi Paul, this looks pretty promising ! if there's any way to help beta testing, please let me know
 
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