An Overwhelmed Noob

Hey folks,
I got my Daisy Pod a few weeks ago now and I’m starting to wonder if I made the right choice. I backed the kickstarter because I thought that Daisy would be just as easy to use as Arduino, but with more power for whatever project I could think of. I’m still glad I backed, but after reading through documentation and not understanding much of it, I’m now seeing that the only reason I’ve been able to do projects with Arduino/Teensy is because of the large communities that post their code. Everything I’ve done on these platforms is mostly based off of someone else’s example and I’ve adapted elements of it to do what I want, but I’m seeing now that I really can’t do much without that support.

So the reason I’m reaching out is this: what do y’all think I should do? Are there good resources for DSP development that don’t assume I already have a background in CS? Should I just go buy more Teensy’s and give up? Wait until Daisy picks up more steam and others post their projects? I work on this stuff for fun and so far it’s only been stressful, especially with everything else happening in the world right now I’m feeling less and less like working on it. I appreciate your time and thoughts.

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@banjomasterpete thanks for sharing this.

Most of the initial development was skewed towards the C++ codebase in order to deploy the libDaisy library.
We are diving into the Arduino examples this week, and expect to have a large set of reference programs to use and build off of.

It’s also worth noting that all of the DaisySP Arduino examples will currently run on your Pod.
They won’t have any controls wired up but they are good starting points for the DSP side of things.

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@banjomasterpete It’s hard to say if it’s the right choice for you of course, but on your way along the Arduinos and Teensys, if you’re looking for something that specifically is made for Audio, you might end up back here (or with an OWL or Qubit or BELA which are different routes but in the same vein of difficulty.) Soo it might be worth sticking with it for a while longer : )

Have you got everything set up and running for Arduino? The wiki has a great step by step instruction:

Note that if you install ArduinoDaisySP ( https://github.com/electro-smith/ArduinoDaisySP ) to the IDE via .zip file, not git, you need to manually add the files from DaisySP ( https://github.com/electro-smith/DaisySP ) without the example folder to the arduino library’s location i.e. Documents\Arduino\libraries\ArduinoDaisySP\src\utility\DaisySP

Once you’ve got everything set up, you should have all the examples in your IDE under File > Examples > DaisySP

A great next step would be to go through all these, compile them, listen, then tweak a couple of parameters that you’ll find in the setup() - SetWaveform, SetFreq, SetAmp etc. to get a feel for what everything in the examples does. Note recompilation will be a lot quicker after the first compile.

I’m doing the same thing now just to see how the Libraries are supposed to work and find them very well thought out so far!

If you’re so inclined, run the simple stuff through some guitar pedals and have fun with it already! I hope you enjoy diving in!

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New examples are live!

We revamped the entire Arduino architecture which you can read about in this post.

There is now a decent amount of Pod example programs which should help out with getting started.

More coming soon.

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Arduino and Teensy were pretty hard to use once upon a time. I’ve used both of these old and new as well as others such as Raspberry Pi which really is much harder. Just hang in there and the Daisy should become just as well resourced over time

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