The possibility of PureData

[Bosbeetle]

I've been kind of hooked on pure data for a while, hacking up some nice evolution like noise making devices (see some old thread in the off topic section of this forums)


But my dream is puredata on the pandora, now there is the option of running slackware and installing PD but that seems beyond my abilities and a bit to laborous.


Now I googled a bit (hey I know how to use google thats quite within my capabilities) and found PD for angstrom on the beagle board.


Now I was wondering if one of you tech savvy guys could check out this text and see wheater it is possible to extend this work and make it run on the pandora as well?


here is the article: http://elsoftwarehamuerto.org/articulos/691/puredata-beagleboard/

 

[Bosbeetle]

Okay next step for me is to learn to read when Im excited:


Xooky Nabox is an application that I wrote in C++ that uses the libpd library to interpret pd patches. It puts pd patches to work as DSP engines and exposes their functionality as a JACK client. In other words, it's an adapter between PD and JACK, without a GUI.


this is not really what I wanted.... still could anybody pwetty please look into if it is worth it to even attempt getting PD to work on the pandora.

 

[dreamer]

I've been trying to compile Pd on the pandora a few times. TCL/TK compiles and works great (the UI is very smooth). However, I'm unable to get any sound from Pd, although the alsa-devices are detected correctly. (I get some errors I'll post here tonight)


Eventually I'd like to see the full Pd-Extended (with all the community externals) and hopefully even GEM working.


(someone is working on a GLES2.0 port iirc)

 

[mcobit]

Does it need jack audio?


I think we don't have that on pandora, or at least it is not configured...

 

[Bosbeetle]

I've been trying to compile Pd on the pandora a few times. TCL/TK compiles and works great (the UI is very smooth). However, I'm unable to get any sound from Pd, although the alsa-devices are detected correctly. (I get some errors I'll post here tonight)


Eventually I'd like to see the full Pd-Extended (with all the community externals) and hopefully even GEM working.


(someone is working on a GLES2.0 port iirc)

here is another succes story on beagleboard maybe it helps : http://puredata.info...dForBeagleboard


But that uses OSS aparently.


Very cool to hear that people are working on this though.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Does it need jack audio?

Jack is not mandatory.

I think we don't have that on pandora, or at least it is not configured...

We don't have that on Zaxxon ;^). Available under Slack.

 

[dreamer]

Jack is totally unnecessary for Pd to work.


With alsa I get:

snd_pcm_hw_params (input): Invalid argument

snd_pcm_hw_params (output): Invalid argument

But at least the audio-test patch opens.


OSS doesn't work at all.

 

[gadgetoid]

I looked for a Pd on the Pandora as soon as I saw a guy at DevsLoveBacon conference stand up on stage and throw together a theramin-like synthesiser in Pd, in less than 5 minutes. Interesting stuff.

 

[Bosbeetle]

I looked for a Pd on the Pandora as soon as I saw a guy at DevsLoveBacon conference stand up on stage and throw together a theramin-like synthesiser in Pd, in less than 5 minutes. Interesting stuff.

haha yes making theremin is very very easy in pd, it would be a very nice thing to have on the pandora (for me to make patches in the free time that I have, mostly while comuting) for other to do stuff on stage, the touchscreen interface is also very handy for pd.


I hope somebody can figure out how to get sound working for this!

 

[RobFord]

I would love this to happen. Unfortunately I am worse than useless when it comes to any sort of code or porting.


Fingers crossed.

 

[Bosbeetle]

Same here, although if there are some basic things to research that could help the porting dudes I would like to help... hence the links to other omap pd projects etc...


If there is something usefull that needs to be done please tell me, but dont expect me to do something to technical.

 

[rvega]

Hi.


I'm the person who wrote the article quoted by @bosbeetle. If one of you guys has a bit of c or c++ skills, it should be fairly simple to make a bridge between PD and whatever audio API is available on the pandora (ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, OSS, Whatever) using libpd. In the case of the BeagleBoard with Angstrom Linux, I chose to use Jack because I was already familiar with it and it's in the Angstrom repos.


Check out the tutorials/docs at http://libpd.cc/ and also this book: http://libpd.cc/read-the-book/


Cheers!


RV.

 

[Bosbeetle]

Thanks for this post rvega hopefully the right people read it

 

[dreamer]

libpd would be nice, but I'm looking to use the full pandora ui (and hopefully eventually pdextended) for developing patches as well


I don't really have a full grasp on what libpd actually is, it's more of a framework to build applications around pd-patches?


Which externals currently work with it?

 

[dreamer]

Pfew, finally had time to revisit this.

So, on SL4P linuxswat already had jack and Pd packages, however these did not work as expected (qjackctl is fine).

With Jack1 I had many issues, among others an 'alignment trap' which is apparently known for jack on arm systems and has been fixed in the latest git of jack2.

So, I now compiled latest jack2 which runs great! Right now I still have to run it with sudo, but with this the jack_metro program finally worked:


jackd -d alsa -o 2 -i 2 -S -C hw:0,1 -P hw:0,0
Then, I compiled the latest vanilla puredata (0.44) with all the fancy optimization flags, disabled alsa and portaudio and enabled jack:


./configure --disable-alsa --disable-portaudio --enable-jack CFLAGS="-DPANDORA -O2 -pipe -mcpu=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp"
For now I also have to run pd with sudo. Hopefully realtime access can be arranged without it eventually.

All audio-examples I tried seem to work fine (also ran it with x-forwarding so I had a little more room to play with ).

The most elaborate example that I ran (8 voice polyphonic sampler; D11.sampler.poly.pd) used about 40% cpu with jack using less than 10% (this on a 1Ghz pandora).

Next step will be to try pd-extended and see what works there. There are a couple of externals I will definitely need, so fingers crossed

(don't expect any pnd(s) soon)

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Nice.

That was on SL4P ?

 

[dreamer]

Yes.

Slackware really needs some getting used to for me. Also there are quite some slack-builds missing.
I should really look in to debian again. Maybe the builds aren't optimized, but they have loads of prebuild armel packages and pd-extended should be much easier to build.

(right now I'm having issues getting pd-extended to see lua5.1 for instance)

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Can you elaborate a bit more where Slack should be improved plz ?

 

[dreamer]

jackd -d alsa -o 2 -i 2 -S -C hw:0,1 -P hw:0,0

 

[dreamer]

Years later I finally got around to try this stuff again ..

I now have a build of latest pd and Gem from git using gl4es, all inside @ptitSeb 's extended code::blocks environment.

Audio is not working yet, but I'm actually looking to make a little graphics toy with this (audio in would be nice for that though).

Now I need to dive back into the whole pnd creation thing, but first tests of this are pretty good.