Synth / Sound Chips - Or other ideas...

[WilliamK Govinda]

Just reviving the talk we had in the old forum. How about using the Arduino to get some nice SID, Synth, Analog, sampled, etc ... sounds.

Here's a great project using the ATmega88, not Arduino based, but still, check this out.

http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/index.php

"The synthesizer is implemented on an ATmega88, an 8-bit microcontroller with 1 kB of RAM and 8.5 kB of ROM. It receives MIDI data at a jumper-configurable baud rate and produces a 12-bit mono line out signal. What follows is a brief architectural overview."

It has 8 voices!!! 

I will post some other links and ideas soon.

Best Regards, WilliamK

[Senso]

Is a very very smart programmer and I bet that everything is done using assembly, and it doesnt have a lot of interrupts firing so you can have nice things like millis, or serial comms.

[WilliamK Govinda]

Someone from another thread just pointed me out to this:

http://elm-chan.org/works/sd20p/report.html

255 Voices?

Wk

[WilliamK Govinda]

Ok, I see now, its 255 SOUNDS, not voices. ;-)

But how about this one:

http://elm-chan.org/works/mxb/report.html

This is a great thing! Hear the audio example. (save to .mp3 to open with WinAmp)

Now a question, what's the max khz of the ATmega328 PWM output? Or the PWM is done in Software?

Wk

[WilliamK Govinda]

Nevermind, I see that those ATtiny chips has something called "High Frequency PWM" while the regular Arduino chips don't.

So I wonder, if maybe I could use the Arduino IDE like this:

http://hlt.media.mit.edu/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ArduinoATtiny4585

But add some extra code to take advantage of those high frequency PWM outputs. The ATtiny45 has 2 High Frequency PWM outputs, which could generate 16-bit High Quality output from the other page above. Just need to figure out the whole thing first. ;-)

Wk

[Senso]

Atmega328p also as high speed pwm, but the maximum pwm resolution of both chips is 10bits, using 8bits pwm you can play PCM audio very very easily..