What can i actually use the micro SD card with the Daisy Pod for?

Hi Beginner Programmer here, so Noob question coming. Please stick with me :smiley:
I spent my day today reading all the code i could for the Daisy Pod and starting to write my own little Programs to run on the Pod but ive been wondering what i can actually use the SD-Card Slot for / how to utilize it?
Is it mostly there for ie. storing samples, or larger programs? Because every example i have tested so far seemed to be able to just run off internal memory.

I would greatly appreciate some inspiration / ideas / examples that utilize it because i honestly dont know how / for what i could use it.

The SD card is mostly for file storage, not memory. For reference, SD cards have read speeds on the order of MB/s. The internal RAM onboard the STM32H series has a read speed around 3.2GB/s. So sd cards are too slow to be used as memory.
Instead, you can think of the SD card like the hard drive in your computer. You could store and playback samples, wavetables, whatever you want really!

What I expect SD card to be usable for (eventually):

  • loading full samples to memory, this would also be useful for wavetables
  • streaming samples (difference from the above is that it would load just part of large file that won’t fully fit into memory)
  • loading MIDI data
  • loading scala files
  • recording patch output

I think that SD card is a second class citizen, since it’s part of external hardware, rather than Daisy itself.

And a considerably more complicated use case would be loading patch code from the card, but it’s not very likely that this would be supported any time soon.

Streaming samples.
Is Daisy powerful enough to work as a sample player with multiple tracks you can trigger and control over midi. E.g. playback of backing tracks with panning - individual outputs for a live performance? A very precise question, I know, but I’m just wondering about how capable it potentially can be.

Generally what you describe shouldn’t require a lot of resources for processing audio. But card access bandwidth could become a problem. Current SD card access code doesn’t look very efficient. It doesn’t use DMA, so it would block and do nothing while data is being read/written. This would probably be improved eventually.

Note that nobody wrote this code for streaming samples yet, but there are all the necessary building blocks (file access, wav file parsing and ring buffer).

Thanks a lot for answering. Although I really don’t know what most people imagine Daisy is best suited for, I do hope there’s interest for these sorts of things. Also as the field kit has a keyboard it looks as it could be a cool little digital synth or at least a wav file chromatically playback unit. And with some good fx this would be desirable A standalone sampler would really be something…

I hope Daisy is up to this sampler application. I’m waiting for my POD to arrive then that’s exactly what I’m hoping to build Inspired by the samplerbox project https://www.samplerbox.org/

So quite a bit later than I was hoping, but the SD Card stuff has quite a large update incoming.

I’ve detailed it pretty thoroughly on this post.

I’ve made a similar post but I’m very interested in using the Daisy platform to build out a sampler that can playback wav files from the sd card and I’m wondering if this is possible.