baremountain wrote:Yea I think we can all get behind that 100%
I think the fact that you can swap shit is cool enough in and of itself, especially given this:
AlexanderPedals wrote:a lot of our stuff uses an additional chip or two to extend the functionality of the FV-1. If you put a Chesapeake chip in a BitQuest! you're going to be VERY disappointed since we do 90% of the heavy lifting outside of the FV-1 on that pedal.
That is a very cool prospect - I'm curious if you've ever tried to swap out chips between your own pedals? I'd love to hear what a Chesapeake chip sounds like in an F-13, just out of curiosity. The whole defying expectations thing is really the part that interests me.
That also probably does explain why the timing on the Reverse Rad in the Radical housing was a little different too.
The Reverse Radical (and Sky Fi) run the FV-1 at roughly 16KHz, which is half the speed that we normally use. We do the reverse delay by brute-force reading the delay memory backwards and the LFO we use to do this can't read the entire delay address range. If you run the pedal at 32.768KHz then you only get about 480ms of delay time which is super short for a reverse. We run at half-speed to double the delay time, at the expense of high frequency response. If you swap the Reverse chip into something that uses the faster clock, the Reverse mode will be much less usable but the LFOs on the Granular and Spiral modes will go WAY faster and that is super fun.
The Chesapeake (and the Equilibrium DLX) use another IC to do the tap tempo, LFO, and handle the rate control. We're basically driving the FV-1 remotely, not using its LFOs at all on those pedals.
When we started we were using the FV-1 itself to do most of the work in the pedals, other than the Mix control. On the current boards we've got an AVR microcontroller that handles bypass switching, LEDs, plus some extra control options. Depending on the pedal, the AVR might do almost nothing or almost everything.
D.o.S. wrote:AlexanderPedals wrote:After all, I did invent modulation
Highlighting this from your fantastic post because it is still my absolutely favorite example of watching a joke fly totally over an interviewer's head in the gear universe.
If I can't laugh at myself, you guys will do it for me
I hear that I also invented pricing errors, but I don't recall claiming that...
DRodriguez wrote:
I completely agree on the sentiment of being worried about thieving code etc. But, even though you say you're not going to police it, there is some grey area around the statement that your customers aren't licensed to use the EEPROM, especially if you don't specifically say you are selling the license.
This is one of those things surrounding copyright law that pops up every so often with the right to repair bills, etc. But in general, unless there are specific measures in place to prevent someone from accessing software on a device they purchased via language in agreements during the purchase or via locks on the device, they are legally allowed to use the parts of that device as they please. Just like your example of running an application on a single computer, most of the time, it would be legally sound for me to pop the hard drive out of a computer and take it with me to run my software somewhere else, unless I agree to some T&C stating I can't. That does not allow me to copy the code on said device or even duplicating it for personal use.
Until now there was no reason to issue license terms, or a EULA, or any of that business. I honestly don't care if you go swapping chips, as long as you don't possess the chips without the pedals they came in. I wouldn't discourage anyone from opening their pedal and doing what they want - I consider using an F.13 EEPROM in a BitQuest as "fair use." As you said, fair use doesn't include copying the code for your own purposes.
