Project Feasibility

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vjmuzik

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I’m working on a project of recreating this:
BCCE36CF-82B3-4619-BC0A-DF19294773E7.jpeg
But on sort of a larger scale, I am wondering if it’s possible to use a single Teensy 3.6 to recreate something of a similar nature as this.

64 Buttons
8 Encoders with push buttons and touch sense
8 Motorized Faders with touch sense
8 128x64 OLEDs

I plan on using a separate ic to interpret all the touch sense so as to not tie up the Teensy with those. My main concern is the Ethernet side of things since most of the time the entire frame buffer is sent for each OLED (1024 bytes each) when they are updated and I fear that the w5500 spi based modules aren’t going to be able to transfer fast enough to the Teensy. Based on my testing so far, the OLEDs can be updated several times a second and it seems that the Teensy can only keep the buffers of the w5500 from filling up if the sockets are above 8k of memory. I’d like to point out that the buffers on the device I’m trying to recreate are 64k for the Ethernet and using an older 240 MHz NXP Processor with built in Ethernet, which is not out of spec per say with an overclocked Teensy 3.6 with built in Ethernet. However, currently the support for the Teensy’s builtin Ethernet is lacking so I would be stuck with the w5500 on that front.
 
I'm not familiar with that product. Does it send & receive just control data similar to MIDI, or does it actually stream 8+ channels of audio?
 
It’s basically a MIDI controller of sorts, but it doesn’t use the MIDI protocol at all and is Ethernet tcp based. It uses a protocol called Eucon to communicate with Eucontrol which then controls a DAW, so it’s kind of a MIDI controller.
 
If TCP is used, you should be fine. TCP automatically manages flow control and resends lost packets.

The ethernet library was recently updated, so get version 2.0.0 for the latest. For event-based stuff, I would imaging the W5500 is fast enough. Testing on a LAN shows it can go about 1.1 Mbyte/sec on Teensy 3.6, with the default settings. If you're using a LAN and want more performance for W5500, you can edit util/w5100.h for faster SPI speed. It'll run about 2.2X faster if you use 30 MHz SPI.

If you're going to communicate over the internet, then packet latency and the buffer sizes become the main bottleneck. In that case you'd want to edit Ethernet.h to reduce the number of sockets and enable large buffers.
 
I can’t speak speak for this specific model of a EuCon device but the protocol was described as being for 10/100Mbyte Ethernet. Being that this is one of the smaller ones I hope I can get away with the slower speed if I increase the SPI clock speed.
 
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