On Monday, February 1st, we presented a final proposal for the complete set of features and scope of The Waveshaper. Having decided what we are building, we shifted focus this week onto the beginnings of a hardware-implementation design.
We met to form consensus on a high-level description of what The WaveShaper is to be in technical terms, specifying HDL modules, finalizing the choices for I/O, and defining the black-box specifications (inputs and outputs) for the individual components and sub-systems of which The WaveShaper shall be comprised. Successful divide-and-conquer team dynamics require each contributor to understand precisely how their own work interfaces with the parts a teammate will design
Specifically, this week we decided:
- To implement on an FPGA development board.
- To sample at 44.1kHz with a 16-bit-depth.
- To use MIDI’s user-defined System Exclusive (SysEx) commands for WaveShaper-specific communication.
These questions will lead the design process over the next week:
- Which FPGA development board to use?
- How can we best quantify the signal bandwidth requirements in terms of FPGA area, speed, and extended features?
- What memory solution is best for our requirements?
Of possible interest is the more specific block diagram we made in our first all-hands meeting after the proposal presentation.
