I'm wondering if there is a way to write an instrument in csound, and upload it to a microcontroller, such as the Arduino. Make Magazine sells a small keyboard for the Arduino.
Since the Arduino runs on AVR-C, and can be expanded with C++ libraries, I was hoping there was a way to load a CSound instrument to the Arduino, to play it with the little keyboard. (I would probably build larger, more playable keys.)
I'm more of a hardware guy, and don't know much programming - so I'm coming for help.
Can this be done?
Would I need to upload an entire csound library to the arduino, or could an individual instrument be compiled just for the arduino?
Or would a whole new version of csound need to be written, like was done for the OLPC?
(I would need your help with that, since I'm just getting the hang of if, then, and loops.)
Would csound have to be stripped down to run on the Arduino hardware? (16MHz, ATmega168 microprocessor)
Aside from myself, this could benefit the open source music community.
Unlikely, I think
The Arduino looks like a nice little gadget (saw it at the Maker Faire) but it'd be a tall order to use Csound on it.
For a start, an Instrument in an Orchestra file isn't really compiled -- in the sense of generated machine code. It is rather turned into some in-memory lists of the opcodes to be invoked. As I remember, the references in the lists are just pointers to the (current) memory locations of the opcodes, so it would be hard to keep a precompiled version around.
The opcodes themselves are of course compiled C code, but they are all present in the executable (well in version 5 many are in runtime libraries, but the idea is the same). I suppose it would be possible to set up some scheme that would make an executable with just the desired opcodes, but it would not be simple. (I couldn't track down how much memory an Arduino may have. It may not be enough for anything the size of even a trimmed Csound. Dunno.)
Finally there's the question of audio. It looks as if the board has a simple PWM output, (and that mini-synth kit you refer to has audio out) but driving it from Csound would likely be a lot of work.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but...(:-/)