[lukeh]

Re: yours, that is a _long_ boot time. Boot time on mine isn't great, but I think I'm just going to have to accept that as an artefact of U-Boot, Linux, and an Ethernet switch chip that takes some time to initialise.

Anyway, re: my widget: it's a personal monitor mixer [1], something one might use in the studio or live, not dissimilar to existing products in the market, except: it supports up to 64 channels of Dante or AVB natively, it has a super nice (HiDPI) UI, and absolutely everything is remote controllable using OCA (AES70) or OSC. I even have a MCP bridge so you can let Claude manage it ;) [2]

The hardware is a custom board that hosts a CM4 SOM (for the control plane and UI), a Brooklyn 3 SOM (Dante), and an XMOS which runs the mixer firmware and AVB stack. There are also some nice AKM DACs, and a Marvell Ethernet switch chip that connects the SOMs and XMOS to two external Ethernet ports.

The CM4 runs Yocto which manages the switch in DSA mode (i.e. hardware offloaded bridge), runs the gPTP and SRP stacks for AVB, the OCA daemon, and the UI (which is just a regular OCA client). SSH is presently enabled but there's not a lot to do once you're in there. Working on secure boot at the moment with U-Boot and dm-verity.

[1] https://forums.swift.org/t/an-embedded-audio-product-built-w... (note, older prototype)

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukehowardmusic_heres-a-long-...

[ssl-3]

I'm astounded to hear that you consider this your first hardware project. That is, to be clear, rather fucking amazing.

At first, I wanted to ask why all that work is done locally instead of just controlling a mixer over the network. Because, I mean, when networked audio is already happening there's almost invariably some kind of mixer involved somewhere, but think I get it: Controls for mixers are all over the place, but AVB and Dante are fixed and unitized and it's easy-enough to find those streams (and/or for someone to make them available) on a network.

That makes your method very universal in application. Even when the monitor feed is an analog split (as is still often the case), it's easy-enough to convert that to Dante or AVB with a stage box [which can be rented] so the performers still control their own ears.

Nice, dude.

And yes, I want one. (Whether I can afford one or not is a different thing entirely, but the want is resolute.)

[lukeh]

Well, also to be clear, I did find a great hardware engineer to design the board based on my somewhat outrageously over-engineered specifications. And I have been working on it for three years and haven't shipped.

It's a great question, and indeed a centralised mixer is pretty much the common approach as it allows for economies of scale. I guess there's a philosophical bent, the same reason I run my own SMTP and IMAP servers instead of Gmail: I like distributed systems. The practical bent is that, in my studio (the target market!), I only really need one or two of these, so the economy of scale doesn't apply. And interestingly with things like Lawo .edge we are seeing distributed mixers come into fashion.

And as you point out, being protocol-agnostic means that it can fit into a lot of scenarios, which might be useful (say) if it were to be a hire product.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat more, I'm lukeh at padl dot com.