CTAG FACE and BEAST Multichannel Audio Systems

Our multi-channel audio capes are in stock and ready for shipping at shop.bela.io!

Both, the CTAG FACE and BEAST are available for preorder (https://shop.bela.io/ctag). 

£15 DISCOUNT FOR PREORDERS

We plan to release both of our audio cards (face (12ch) and Beast (24ch)) in Q1 of 2018 in bigger quantities. All information will be published here.

We just started our first production series in small quantities. Due to still remaining issues with the Beast (prototypes work fine, but newer versions still have bugs), we decided to produce the face2|4 only at first. The face2|4 can be directly stacked on the BBB or BBG without any additional hardware. The drivers are already merged in the BeagleBoard.org kernel and are included in the default debian images for BeagleBone. Please send me a message with your name and desired units, if you are interested.

After some hard work of board redesign and driver modifications, we finally got our 24 channel modular BEAST to work. The system offers 8 input channels and 16 output channels by daisy chaining two AD1938 audio codecs. The soundcard was shrunk to the same form factor as the BeagleBone Black/Green, thus can be directly stacked as cape on the BBB/BBG without needing an additional adapter board. Moreover the soundcard can still be used only with 8 output channels and 4 input channels like the old version. Currently, we are in the final phase of hardware design and driver development fixing the last bugs for stable operation. An image is given in the project pictures. Driver development takes place here (still experimental). In the future we want to produce a small series of the CTAG Beast. If you are interested in the first series, feel free to write me a personal message, so we can better estimate the units. More information coming soon!

This year I participated in Google Summer of Code to improve our audio system. The CTAG face2|4 Audio Card driver has been successfully ported to BeagleBoard-X15 (dual core TI AM5728) and is backwards compatible with BeagleBone Black/Green. Moreover an user-space library has been created to offload typical signal operations (FFT, IFFT, filter) to C66x DSPs (integrated in AM5728). The full project documentation is available on GitHub.

The new SD-Card image includes the most recent version of JACK and SuperCollider.

Moreover we've created a script to automatically start JACK and SCSYNTH (SuperCollider server).

-> You can create your own synthesizers or effects with SuperCollider on your local PC and run them on our audio system via network.

We're looking for a low cost SBC with a more powerful CPU and multichannel I2S port (e.g. Freescale i.MX series or TI AM5728) to achieve a lower latency and implement more complex audio effects or synthesizers. The Allwinner SoCs seem to be a good choice, too. Unfortunately the ASoC platform driver for the Enhanced Serial Audio Interface (ESAI) of Allwinner SoCs only support 2 audio channels. We appreciate any suggestions.

Currently, I'm trying to use the Linux built-in USB audio gadget kernel module. If it works, the audio system could be used as an external USB audio device on several operating systems as well. If anybody has experience with this subject, I appreciate your support:)