VST Host in Stompbox?

[mwynwood]

Hi all,
I recently saw the PedalShield (http://www.electrosmash.com/pedalshield), which most of you are probably familiar with - and it got me thinking....
Could an Arduino or Rasperry Pi be setup as a minimal, low latency VST host, in a stompbox format.
Then, you could load any VST into it, assign the knobs and switches and away you go.
Just wondering if anyone has had this thought before, and even if it would be achievable.
Thanks! 

[Hatredman]

Not VST because it's proprietary (and you need Windows) but these guys did something similar with the VL2 format (a free implementation of VST funcionality):

http://portalmod.com/

[FiveseveN]

There are already fairly old products like that: http://www.museresearch.com/products/ http://www.smproaudio.com/index.php/en/products/v-machines/v-machine etc.
Nowadays you could probably fit a Windows box in a pedal but I don't think it's worth it.
Pro: you could use any of the myriad effects in VST format, provided you have enough resources.
Con: absolutely massive overhead.
VST is just the "packaging", what we're interested in is the algorithm, what the effect actually does to audio. That can be implemented much more efficiently. Unfortunately the interesting VST effects are seldom open source, and quite often expensive and resource-intensive.

[slacker]

.

[slacker]

(and you need Windows)

You don't need Windows, there are VSTs that are written for Linux and ways to run Windows ones on Linux for these you need an x86 or x64 processor though so the Raspberry Pi is out.

[Hatredman]

(and you need Windows)

You don't need Windows, there are VSTs that are written for Linux and ways to run Windows ones on Linux for these you need an x86 or x64 processor though so the Raspberry Pi is out.

I was just making it simple. Anyway, there's no way you could run VSTs on RaspPI or Arduino as it is, you'd have to develop a lot of software, drivers, kernel & stuff to accomplish that.

[llemtt]

In my experience the biggest limitation to running VST or AU in a "limited resources" stompbox is their floating point processing, unless you can put a DSP or a MCU or a CPU with a FPU into your box.

I'm actually building an ARM Cortex-M3 solution based on Arduino Due and, even if I plan to move to Cortex-M4 later (i.e. STM32F4 which comes also in a version with FPU), I do all processing using q31 fixed point.

cheers
teo