CTM, now for the Pi. (Patreon)

My performance/show laptop, bloodstorm, took a turn for the worse about two weeks ago, when the charging circuit started on fire. Fortunately the laptop itself is (mostly) okay, but it will only charge while off, and only run from battery while on. So, after a solid 8 years of service, I decided with a heavy heart that it was time to retire bloodstorm and start working on The Next Solution to shows.

Rather than an OG Raspberry Pi, I've ended up with this cute little Orange Pi One (a whole $19; I think they're even cheaper now) from cnlohr. Originally we dangled it off the back of his head and ran a Vive from it, so certainly that means it should be good enough for music, right?

Well, the results are already spoiled above. After dropping a copy of Armbian on microSD (slooooooooow) and installing all the dependencies (a little bit faster), I ran my compiler script to set up the synthesizer board drivers. CTM runs out of the box at anywhere from 70~100fps on the Pi, unmodified. To give you an idea, that's only about 1/3 the speed of my development laptop, but also, my development laptop is an i7.

Anyway, I've got a lot more exploration and experimentation to do, but I'm pretty happy with things so far, at least as a starting point. From here I think I might learn a little bit of OpenGL. The tracker isn't going to be 3D or anything, but I can take advantage of the GPU to accelerate screen drawing some. If anyone has advice on using OpenGL to speed up 2D, I'm all ears; I'll probably be using PyOpenGL. I also need to make sure that the synthesizer boards actually work when connected to the Pi.

I'll keep you posted!