Even more synth updates

Things have been moving with synth projects this last month, first up the Quardowave card for the Isla Instruments Caladan has arrived, I’ve assembled it, checked power and got blink working on the CPUs.

I still have to debug the VCFs but the other parts, like DACs and VCAs are the same as the OPL3 card I’ve been working on for Isla Instruments, so they shouldn’t be a problem. The next job is coding the CPUs and getting some sounds out.
I’m looking forward to getting this up and running and making some sounds, it should sound epic.

In other news the prototype voice holder for Delta has arrived and been assembled, I’ve also assembled and calibrated 4 of the dual VCF cards.

As you can see, I’ve got Audio out, MIDI in and MIDI out, as well as power and of course the two dev boards (FPGA and microcontroller).

I’ve also tested the FPGA one bit DACs and all 40 of them are running nicely at 25MHz and 16 bit depth, all the VCFs and VCAs respond accordingly which is a really big milestone.

Next is work on the VHDL and C code, my plan for now is to use my MIDI controller sending various CC’s to test features as I add them in the FPGA code. There is a lot of rework to do for the VHDL as the features have grown (more oscillators per voice, more VCFs, VCAs, etc) and as a result a lot more control and modulation routing needs to be done, so this isn’t going to be a quick project.
The user interface has not yet been planned out, but I have allowed for a reasonable number of knobs and a display for this. As there is a lot to get right, the UI won’t be the final one, but will be more fully featured than the previous one.