Henning Thielemann wrote:
> I am reading on
> http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2011/?page=participation
> that one topic of the Linux Audio Conference is "Audio Hardware
> Support". This refreshes my curiosity whether there are open source
> Hardware synthesizers?
There is a the FPGA-Synth website and mailing list:
http://www.fpga.synth.net/
where people are doing synth designs in Verilog or VHDL and programming
them into FLGAs.
> Unfortunately not only its firmware is closed-source, but some
> settings cannot be changed by the built-in buttons, but only via the
> closed-source Windows software.
> Sure, it might be possible to snoop the USB communication between a
> firmware updater and the keyboard and try to analyse it.
This is actually relatively easy. I've done it a couple of
times. The trick is to do the snooping on Linux (with the
usbmon kernel module) and run the windows software under
Wine or a VM like VirtualBox.
Once you've figured out the protocol, its pretty easy to
write Linux replacement code using libusb.
> This would require USB knowledge,
A little knowledge that is easy to come by.
> some guess on the control chip in the keyboard
> and a lot of time and patience, and an invalid firmware update may leave
> the keyboard in an unusable and unalterable state.
If you snoop and reverse engineer the protocol you wouldn't need
to change the firmware, you'd just be doing whatever the windows
program does.
Hope this provides you with some inspiration.
CHeers,
Erik
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/
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