alt Hacker NewsI’m building an audio device. It runs Linux for the control plane (it’s just a CM4 running Yocto, maybe I’ll leave SSH running on production units, maybe not, haven’t decided yet). No audio passes through the CM4, there’s a dedicated FPGA and MCU for that. It’s been a fun project, first time hardware for me, feel free to ask my anything!
Nice!
This particular box also has RS-232, ssh (with almost zero auth), and telnet as a control plane, by default. Any of that only gets used to tweak/report various things with a rather basic human-readiable protocol. (It has built-in functions to make it more secure; I just don't care on my home LAN, or on my pop-up LANs in the field. A sane person with a professional role would have it locked down and on its own VLAN/VPN, but for me and prototyping: Telnet is actually pretty good.)
I designed none of it. I just bought it, and make good use of it. New, it was a mid-4-digit box; used, they're not so bad. (And I use it every day and like it quite a lot, hence the reluctance to go harder on the potential root shell hack.)
My box, as it sits, just does general-purpose GUI-connected DSP stuff with near-realtime tweaking. I'm in the process of getting it to grok OSC, and thus Reaper or whatever, so it has a better control surface for live work.
It has a USB interface that my Linux box treats as a sound card, which works well. My main reason for wanting to get root is to examine (solve?) its ~5-minute boot times.
5 minutes in a live sound environment is the difference between having a large, active, and involved crowd, and having everyone get bored and find something else to do.
Anyway, the FPGAs here just exist to behave as DSPs and...well, digitally process [audio] signals. It works well; I really just wish it booted faster.
And that may be its downfall. :P
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But enough about that.
What's your device do? What are your plans and dreams with it? (Do I want one?)
I've built a very small amount of hardware. At least at the level of custom PCBs and some code, it's been richly rewarding even when I screw it up, and it makes me feel like I'm on top of the world when I get it right.
Can you tell me about your widget?