Would you pay $5 for a 30 minute Zoom session on SpinCAD?

[Digital Larry]

Aron - feel free to delete this if it's not appropriate.

No, I'm not trying to supplement my income. 

The reality is that I found it very difficult to write exhaustive documentation or do videos about SpinCAD.  It's a lot of effort to invest in something that didn't generate a lot of return.  However, I am pleased that so many people have found this tool useful, and would be willing to do an occasional interactive session.  The main reason to have a signup fee is simply to provide additional impetus for people to show up.  We do a lot of webinars where I work and the signup to attendee ratio is about 10% most of the time.

Based on some questions I got in this forum, I did actually start looking at SpinCAD code again recently.  Specifically, the envelope follower blocks, and whether it was possible to have pot controls on attack and decay.  I started using the "scope" simulation feature with some 440 Hz tone bursts I created in Audacity.  This allows me to visualize the envelope follower behavior on screen.   I soon realized that the scope settings are not saved so you'd have to reset them every time you ran a simulation.  Bottom line, the hood is up, I'm making some small changes, and who knows what could happen.

I imagine a max of 10 people at a time to allow for Q&A.   I can cover basics, advanced, the SpinCAD program code itself, etc.  I'm less likely to go into direct editing of SpinASM.

Send me a message if you'd be willing to spend $5 on a 30-minute session. 
Tell me if you have a specific question.
Also, let me know where you're located so I can take time zone into consideration.  I sense many of you are in Europe.  The continent.  I'll take it from there.

[pruttelherrie]

Hi Larry, my $0.02: I'm not your target audience since I'm perfectly happy with the functionality of SpinCAD as it is. I'm just using the blocks as-is, know my way around and have no wish to dive deeper. Too many projects, not enough time, etc.

That said, would I find myself diving deeper nonetheless, I would have no problem shelling out $5 for some kind of "helpdesk" session.

[Digital Larry]

Haha well thanks for your response, that makes 1 person who could even be bothered to say "no thanks"!

[bluebunny]

If this were on my radar, then I'd sign up.  It's a good idea and five bucks is a steal.  Personally, IT is my day job and I've been strictly analogue for my hobby - I have no desire to allow myself a crossover, however tempting it may sound.  (But never say never...)

I sense many of you are in Europe.  The continent.

Wouldn't it be great if many of us were in Europe, the band?   

[potul]

If I needed to I would pay the 5$ fee, this is more than reasonable. But honestly, I'm not using spinCAD much lately, I'm more working on ASM directly. quite frequently I start with SpinCAD to build the basic structure, but then jump into editing the code directly.

[vigilante397]

I designed a dev board for FV-1, I installed SpinCAD, and for the last year or so have stuck with only using the .hex files I can find online I'm still probably not the target audience for this, but I think listening to someone talk about SpinCAD for 30 minutes would motivate me to finally get into it, so I would totally be in

[Digital Larry]

I'm more working on ASM directly. quite frequently I start with SpinCAD to build the basic structure, but then jump into editing the code directly.

Out of curiosity, can you tell me what shortcomings of SpinCAD have you doing this?  I'm aware of a few major omissions.

DL

[Digital Larry]

All I had to do was to pull a nose hair so I'd start crying, and do the puppy dog eyes thing, and a couple nice people tell me they'd be willing to kiss $5 goodbye on the off chance I can tell them something interesting about SpinCAD.     Thanks for the confidence!

Two is better than none.  At least one of you is in Central US.  I am in California.  I am going to propose this next Saturday morning, which would be anywhere from 9 AM to 12 PM by my reckoning.  Send me a DM if this time works for you and then I'll get back with a PayPal address.  Also, note that I am planning to record the meetings (if that's possible with a free account) and then edit and post it on YouTube for all eternity.

Since you said you aren't using SpinCAD yet I will dedicate at least 10 minutes to getting started with it all.

DL

[potul]

Out of curiosity, can you tell me what shortcomings of SpinCAD have you doing this?  I'm aware of a few major omissions.
DL

Nothing special as missing capabilities, but I find myself leaning to ASM usually in these cases:

1-Trying push FV1 to its limits, using it somehow in creative ways.
Example: I wrote a program that does 2 seconds delay with the standard clock rate, by interleaving the delay memory.

2-When dealing with a lot of decision points or branches. Being familiar with programming C, and some assembler, it's faster for me to go and program it in a few lines instead of looking for convoulted ways to do it in Spin ASM.
Examples: My own version of a tap tempo syncronized delay, a simlar tremolo, and some programs with pot skips.

3-In general, in cases where I need precise control of what is happening, and my lack of knowledge around SpinCAD makes it had to understand how the parameters get calculated.
Example: some blocks have frequency inputs, but you can't control or see in in Hz units. Just from 0 to 1, without knowing what is the range. I don't recall exactly what block was it, maybe a filter?

4- Reusing existing code. Things like Reverbs are a mistery to me. I can't really program a reverb, but there are alot of nice reverbs out there already coded.

I aknowledge that in some cases it's more my own limitations understanding what happens under the hood of SpinCAD, than SpinCAD limitations that are pushing me out.

Mat

[Ice-9]

Hi Larry,

I think an online session could be very good for a lot of people. Having said that though I am not your target audience either as I do all my coding using Spin Assembly rather than SpinCad. I have looked at SpinCad and it is a great building block with so many features for the FV-1 user that does not want to dig deep into the programming language of the FV-1.

[Digital Larry]

Hi Larry,

I think an online session could be very good for a lot of people. Having said that though I am not your target audience either as I do all my coding using Spin Assembly rather than SpinCad. I have looked at SpinCad and it is a great building block with so many features for the FV-1 user that does not want to dig deep into the programming language of the FV-1.

Mick,

You've already achieved FV-1 "Beyond Thunderdome" status.   

[Digital Larry]

Out of curiosity, can you tell me what shortcomings of SpinCAD have you doing this?  I'm aware of a few major omissions.
DL

Nothing special as missing capabilities, but I find myself leaning to ASM usually in these cases:

1-Trying push FV1 to its limits, using it somehow in creative ways.
Example: I wrote a program that does 2 seconds delay with the standard clock rate, by interleaving the delay memory.

2-When dealing with a lot of decision points or branches. Being familiar with programming C, and some assembler, it's faster for me to go and program it in a few lines instead of looking for convoulted ways to do it in Spin ASM.
Examples: My own version of a tap tempo syncronized delay, a simlar tremolo, and some programs with pot skips.

3-In general, in cases where I need precise control of what is happening, and my lack of knowledge around SpinCAD makes it had to understand how the parameters get calculated.
Example: some blocks have frequency inputs, but you can't control or see in in Hz units. Just from 0 to 1, without knowing what is the range. I don't recall exactly what block was it, maybe a filter?

4- Reusing existing code. Things like Reverbs are a mistery to me. I can't really program a reverb, but there are alot of nice reverbs out there already coded.

I aknowledge that in some cases it's more my own limitations understanding what happens under the hood of SpinCAD, than SpinCAD limitations that are pushing me out.

Mat

1) I did look at the 8-second delay code once and tried to adapt it.  Something weird happened.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

2) Yes, if you are doing logic like counting button presses or pot skip routines, SpinCAD does not handle these.  I was thinking of offering a 1-in-4-out rotary switch type thing that would use Pot skips, but that is very limiting as you would have to put independent code sections in each path.  I figure if you want pot skip code in there you can stitch it in by hand.  An alternative would be to come up with blocks that had a specific pot-skip behavior built in.  Again that is limiting though.

3) Most of the filters, IIRC just take the "coefficient" in their control input.  Some of the examples I took from Spin's site probably have some pre-scaling or log conversion or other things done also.  It would be a good exercise to go through all blocks and make them consistent in this regard.  In practice I dial them in by ear.

4) Reverbs, absolutely, are not a good match for SpinCAD.   Conceivably one could develop a "reverb builder" dedicated app.  It would require you to review every single example of Spin reverbs, and then abstract their structural similarities and differences into some representation in the SpinCAD Builder language.  Or (cough) you could just do them in Spin ASM which would be my recommendation.

[potul]

1) I did look at the 8-second delay code once and tried to adapt it.  Something weird happened.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Yes, this is the one I took as a starting point, and modified it to have adjustable delay up to 2 seconds. I had to wrap my head around it , and unwrapp it multiple times until I got it working. It's a tricky piece of code and a single error in one ram address blows everything away. At the end I think some of the final adjustments where done on trial-and-error basis, more than knowing 100% what I was doing.

[Regedit]

No, I'm not trying to supplement my income. 

And for nothing! I would recommend that you make this 30-minute "lesson" a little bigger, better, and a little more accessible to everyone, i.e., perhaps simplify some of its elements, and you can charge more money and get a lot more coverage. Unfortunately or fortunately, most people use SpinCAD without much immersion in it, and they have enough functionality and won't even understand it.
All in all, it's not a bad idea, but it's too highly specialized.

[Digital Larry]

No, I'm not trying to supplement my income. 

And for nothing! I would recommend that you make this 30-minute "lesson" a little bigger, better, and a little more accessible to everyone, i.e., perhaps simplify some of its elements, and you can charge more money and get a lot more coverage. Unfortunately or fortunately, most people use SpinCAD without much immersion in it, and they have enough functionality and won't even understand it.
All in all, it's not a bad idea, but it's too highly specialized.

I'm not really sure what you're saying, but I won't hold my breath waiting for you to sign up!  Perhaps it is hard to understand my motivations.  I'll make a brief attempt to explain.

a) Every year about this time, my mind goes into sort of a manic creative phase.  e.g. last week I spent many hours redesigning an FV-1 PC board that I am probably never going to have made.  I'm trying to recognize this energy and harness it and also let go of things which don't show immediate promise.  Sometimes this involves songwriting.  A couple years ago I did actually consider trying to sell pedals commercially, but I couldn't bring myself to abandon my current paycheck for something that risky.  At my age I'm not too hopped up about working two full time jobs.  It's also pretty tough to run a manufacturing company with 1 person.  Unless maybe that person is well versed in manufacturing, which I am not.  I don't regret the decision, but I did have to let those visions of the confetti and awards and babes and paparazzi just drift off into the ethereal trails of the shimmery cavernous reverb.... 

b) Whether I can promote or expand the use of SpinCAD to a large audience really doesn't matter to me.  If I were the one selling FV-1 chips, that would be a different story.  In order to get the most out of SpinCAD, you really need to understand the FV-1's limitations if not its syntax, and that makes for a pretty small crowd.

c) One aspect of SpinCAD's development I find interesting is that of collaboration with people you may never meet.  For example,  SpinCAD was based on an open-source Java library called ElmGen (who knows why) that this guy Andrew Kilpatrick who has a synthesizer company came up with.  I got to meet Andrew at the 2018 NAMM show so that was fun (maybe not so much for him).  Another aspect of this is that I can think of one guy especially who really influenced many of the features in SpinCAD, because (when I still had my own forum) he'd say "can you do this?" "can you do that"? and it was that impetus that pushed me forward to add some of these things.  I met that guy at NAMM too!  He has two different pedal companies. 

This happened again recently when someone asked about the envelope follower blocks here.  I never used envelope blocks too much so I didn't put a lot of effort into them.  That is one really loose end in the program that I may actually try to clean up.  As presented today they are almost useless.  I have some pride!

Now, getting back to this Zoom thing, two people have provisionally signed up, and I am probably going to be doing it at 10 AM California time this coming Saturday.  We'll see how it goes.  What's the worst that could happen?  "Digital Larry ripped me off for 5 bucks!" or whatever.   

[reichi]

In all seriousness, asking 10$/Hour is hardly ever gonna be "a ripoff".
Well it may be, but the other way around! .

Everyone reading around here will know you, and how many hours you have invested into the DSP Topic.

[potul]

I'm tempted to join the session just to hang out with some spinCAD mad boys....
I'm checking my agenda, but this time I think it will not match.

[Ice-9]

Hi Digital Larry, 10am California time would make it quite good for the UK people as that is 6pm for us so I might jump in to see how it goes. If you go ahead with this it would be interesting to see how it goes.

[vigilante397]

Hi Digital Larry, 10am California time would make it quite good for the UK people as that is 6pm for us so I might jump in to see how it goes. If you go ahead with this it would be interesting to see how it goes.

Works for me too, that's noon, so I'll even be awake

[Digital Larry]

Well we have a few more spots available.     Quite a few.  No need to shove now, miss. 

10 AM California time tomorrow, Saturday

DM if interested.

$5 cover charge includes coffee (for me)

DL