Sebastian Holzapfel, of German open supply audio {hardware} specialist apfelaudio, desires to place a bit FPGA in your Eurorack synthesizer setup — actually, with the Tiliqua module.
“Tiliqua goals to make FPGA-based audio and video synthesis accessible to everybody,” Holzapfel explains of his creation. “The Tiliqua {hardware} structure, alongside a complete assortment of instance initiatives inbuilt Python (Amaranth HDL [Hardware Description Language]), permits you to experiment with synthesis methods which might be out of attain of embedded microcontroller-based platforms. Suppose excessive oversampling for alias-free audio-rate modulation, low-latency results, video synthesis, and high-speed USB audio.”
Should you’re a fan of the Eurorack modular synth commonplace, Sebastian Holzapfel desires to place a bit FPGA in your setup. (📷: apfelaudio)
The Tiliqua itself, designed to fit straight in to a Eurorack setup, is predicated on an open-hardware FPGA module dubbed the soldiercrab and constructed across the Lattice ECP5 field-programmable gate array chip, with 25k logic components, 16MB of HyperRAM/octal-SPI RAM, 16MB of SPI flash, and a high-speed USB PHY. This connects to a motherboard that provides a switched rotary encoder with bar-graph show, the FPGA’s USB port and a debug port dealt with by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, two enlargement ports, a 720p60 show output, and a MIDI enter jack.
A 3rd board, the audio interface, completes the Tiliqua’s design, delivering 4 enter and 4 output DC-coupled audio channels supporting as much as 24-bit audio at 192kHz sampling charges. For compositions that do not want that many channels, any enter or output can double as a contact or proximity sensor enter, whereas every channel has user-programmable pink/inexperienced LEDs with pulse-width modulation (PWM) help.
The module gives PMOD-compatible enlargement headers, which might prolong it to 24 whole audio channels. (📷: apfelaudio)
“Tiliqua can retailer as much as 8 initiatives (bitstreams) concurrently — you’ll be able to change between them at runtime without having a PC,” Holzapfel notes of the FPGA’s flexibility. “Out of the field, Tiliqua may be: a video synthesizer (vectorscope show with audio-rate beam modulation); a multichannel wavetable oscillator (1MHz oversampling for audio-rate FM [Frequency Modulation]); a high-speed 4 in/4 out USB 2.0 audio interface; a polyphonic MIDI/contact synthesizer; a multichannel diffusion delay; a multichannel pitch shifter; a MIDI/CV converter; [and] a matrix mixer.”
Design information for the challenge have been revealed on GitHub beneath the Strongly Reciprocal variant of the CERN Open {Hardware} License Model 2; Holzapfel is making ready to launch a crowdfunding marketing campaign for the Tiliqua on Crowd Provide quickly.