Re: [LAU] open hw soundcard

From: Karl Hammar <karl@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Mon Nov 16 2009 - 20:47:26 EET

Mike Mazarick:
> 1. There is a lot more that goes into a product than design (marketing,
> support, etc.). It may be a good idea to consider partnering with a
> company that already provides similar services (hardware, support, etc.)
> because they already have the distribution and marketing set up and
> operational. It is important not to discount the amount of effort and
> investment needed to make this happen and to understand that they will need
> to make some type of investment that has to pay off for them. This can
> still be done in the open source context, but there has to be some plausible
> answer to the question "If I put a bunch of money forward for doing the
> necessary 'missionary work', what is to stop anyone else from coming along
> and taking advantage of this investment and cutting off my legs with a lower
> price for the same thing after I've made the investment?". We all realize
> that an upfront investment in both R&D and marketing is needed for a
> successful soundcard, because in electronics, the unit costs go down
> dramatically after you pass each of the 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 unit
> thresholds. It almost makes the investment in R&D and marketing/sales look
> like a single cost with one cost for any number of units. Who knows? With
> an adequate explanation and a plan, one of the existing 'majors' may even
> provide some funding for this idea.

For me, this is more of a fun add-on and a benchmark, more along the
line to show that the rest of the system is capable.

For the rest of the system I already have a customer paying the R&D.

My intention is to have the design available as open hardware, since
then I can point to the source and tell a potential customer that even
if my company goes out of business, the product is not a dead end.
Siemens, TAC and other PLC [1] makers lock their customers in, this is
to lock them out (the big name companies:).

And, if someone takes the thing and produces it cheeper than I can do,
well, then I have a supplier and I can do the consulting which pays off
more.

And... everything get copied and my company is to small to hunt down
people that copy. My time is better spent delivering and finding customers.

> 2. The proposed open hw soundcard is correctly focused on Ethernet. It
> may turn out that in order to use standard networking gear, that TCPIP be
> eliminated so you won't be limited by packet size. One way to get this
> done without having to think about it a lot is to adopt the ATA over
> Ethernet standard (it's open source) and make the audio read/writes look
> like a hard disk access. Another potential low cost solution that may
> dovetail this idea is to use the eSATA ports that a lot of more modern
> motherboards have built in. If the audio needs to be routed with a router
> over long distances, this can be attacked separately. It is doubtful if
> this can be done without some amount of latency.

Ata over ethernet might be a good solution, but a soundcard does not
easily fit into a random access model. Do you have a suggestion of how
one would implement this ?

As for the eSATA solution, yes, eSATA ports do show up on pc
motherboards, but there is already an ethernet port there and on the
embedded system. And I have currently no interest in adding a
disk-lookalike port to the system unless someone else does the job.

> 3. I like the idea of using custom IC hardware. However, I also like
> using a FPGA (or PLD) to provide the 'glue logic'. One thing that has been
> learned from the effort of getting an old soundcard driver working (gadget
> labs - no hardware DMA built in) software DMA support creates a lot of extra
> effort but reduces the hardware cost. For a network device the equivalent
> is to use something like RDMA (remote DMA) in Infiniband. Some thought
> should be given to how to implement in hardware a direct memory to memory
> transfer without interrupting the CPU on the remote computers.

Yes, FPGA/PLD [2] would be interesting, but not at this point.

> 4. I obviously haven't read or researched enough about this, but some
> discussion would be warranted on what this will do for the musician that he
> can't do now. It's probably worth repeating (I'm too thick to get it in
> just one pass).

Please, I need input on this. What is useful ?

> 5. Obviously, it is important to stick with open source system as much as
> practical and make sure that the windows drivers are open source which
> should be part of the license for using the hardware (even if it has to
> inter-operate with ASIO, WDM, etc.).

Ms-Windows drivers are not for me, maybe someone else can do it.
And I don't think it practically possible to stop a user to run
whatever they like on their system. I don't want to go down that
alley.

Regards,
/Karl

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_Logic_Device

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Received on Tue Nov 17 00:15:03 2009

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