Clicky

PERCUSSA labs behind the scenes: AudioCubes standalone hardware in development

2015-05-25

Besides working on a software modular synthesizer for the AudioCubes, we’re working on a standalone HARDWARE unit for the AudioCubes, so you will no longer need a PC or Mac to use the AudioCubes. It will be a standalone unit which you an buy and use with your existing wireless audiocubes. Or you can buy a full system (cubes + hardware unit) in one go. We're planning to release it after the release of SYNTHOR.

This project has been running in the background for a while and is super exciting. I can’t say much yet about the specs since it’s still early in development, but it will have a small full colour graphics display, a powerful quad core ARM CPU and great sounding 192 KHz 24-bit DAC. Check out the video below of a test setup of our hardware platform.

We’ve started by bringing up the motherboard, attaching a display for development and our audio DAC, and have now ported some of our AudioCubes software to the platform. We’ve already hooked up an AudioCubes network to the board and are able to send and receive wireless data. This means we can run and test our synthesizer code on this platform as well as on Mac and PC desktops, and offer you the option of using the software version of SYNTHOR on your computer, or choose to use the hardware version instead. The advantage of the hardware unit will be that we’ll have more freedom of how much CPU we can use. On a normal computer this always has to be kept down to a reasonable percentage whereas on a hardware unit it doesn’t matter.

I’ll be posting updates from time to time and hope you are as excited about this as I am! This opens up the AudioCubes to everyone out there who doesn’t like to use computers in their music production or live performance workflow.