Daisy Pod: is it possible to upload more than ONE program into it?

Getting Started
1

Hi!

I am considering getting a Daisy Pod as a little portable synth, for sound experimenting, etc., but I have one doubt which I couldn´t solve browsing through the FAQ or basic documentation (maybe I didn’t see it on a fast read)… hope someone can clarify, thanks in advance!

Is it possible to upload more than ONE program into the Daisy Pod at a time? I mean, suppose I get the “Pollen(8)” synth program and flash it to the Daisy Pod, would it be possible to use other programs developed for it, or do you have to delete a program before loading another one???

Best regards,

    Luis
2

Nope, it’s not possible if you use software provided for Daisy. Moreover, your patch is limited by 128kb flash. And that is quickly diminished if you use certain features (USB, display). The external 8Mb QSPI flash chip can be used for storing data, but there’s no official way to write firmware and boot from it yet.

I’ve made a port of OWL to Daisy Patch and it includes support for multiple patches and dynamic patch switching. So it’s certainly possible that something like this will be officially supported eventually.

3

Thanks for your answer, that’s what I thought but needed to confirm… so if I flashed let’s say “Pollen(8)”, it’d be for specific use as a synth, unless I overwrote it with another program to use from then on ONLY the new program.

The solution you mention sounds interesting:

  • Will you make it avilable for public use, will you sell it…?
  • Is it fully functional, or in beta testing phase?
  • Does it function on the standard “Daisy Pod” or does it need any other hardware?

Thank you.

4

Yes, the thing is there’s no separation between firmware and patch in libDaisy. So you can only overwrite previous patch - which includes both code used for hardware access and your DSP code. In case of OWL, the firmware is on a separate flash storage section and multiple patches share another section. So you can dynamically load a different patch, without writing anything to flash or rebooting.

Original OWL firmware is free software under GPL license, I’ve only ported it to Daisy Patch. Thread with info is here. I don’t plan to do the same for other Daisy based hardware, but it’s certainly possible if someone else is interested. It’s not a trivial task though.

That firmware is functional enough to load patches and is not crashing. There still are a few issues that I’ll be looking into and FW itself is based on development branch of OWL codebase. Also note that you won’t be able to run a patch written for Daisy on OWL without rewriting some parts of it (at least in case of C++ patches).

5

Thank you for all the info! Should you ever decide to port it for use in Daisy Pod, please let us know.

I’m not into C++ programming, so I would probably not be able to do that, but thanks anyway. : )

Regards!