An affordable, portable and focused device for music, writing and coding | Hacker News Reader

An affordable, portable and focused device for music, writing and coding

tulip.computer

110 pointsalsetmusic40 comments

I work on this! AMA if you have any questions. I think it's really cool and has been fun to hack on. the main github w/ all the specs and code is at https://github.com/shorepine/tulipcc

Is it easy skip all the Python/AMY stuff and just run sclang on this? Maybe even just through terminal emacs? Just because maybe scide is asking too much here (too tiny of a screen for it perhaps)?

Another idea I would have is to go all the way and just try to put a norns image on this https://github.com/monome/norns

Guess I am just trying to say a cheap computer like this with good midi and dac is worth it in itself, and is probably ready for a lot ecosystems that arent python.

This is a pretty bespoke thing -- stuff made for an RPi / linux won't directly port over. It's running Micropython and has got custom code to handle the screen, there's no obvious framebuffer or terminal. But anything is possible and I bet you could take the bits of the firmware you need to port over your own stuff!

Ah gotcha, that makes a lot of sense and love that its close to the metal like that!

Any chance we can get support for standalone DJ software? Mixxx is free but needs improvements on gui

I'm sitting at a coffee shop taking a break from getting creative work done on my laptop and looking at this thing with all its exposed contacts and a cable you have to connect the screen to the keyboard with and imagining the chaos when someone spills a drink.

For some reason this comment reminds me of the time when it was said that e.g. Apple Macintosh manuals were printed on drool-proof paper [1]. This may just not be your type of device?

Context: I'm typing this on an ancient IBM Model M keyboard surrounded by breadboards with ESP2688's and a few ESP32's (as used in this project), nothing but exposed contacts and patch cables. There is also a 0.75l mug of tea on the desk but never the twain have met. Not in a coffee shop but home on the range where the moose have started to eat our apples again, damn them.

[1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/drool-proof-paper.html

Who on earth flagged this article, and what was your rationale? The device looks so cool and fun!

EDIT: Unflagged, so this is now off topic. Mods, feel free to nuke this comment.

The current title "An affordable, portable and focused device for music, writing and coding" reads like an ad

I would recommend digging deeper than the title in general, and especially when on HN. This is a nerdvana-level product.

At $59, I don’t see any of that being not true.

a lot of posts on HN are submarines anyway, so I don’t see an issue

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

So? So does “NewLang, an untyped colorless language with runtime reflection and low cost abstractions”. You see plenty of titles like that all the time. And they are most certainly soliciting you.

Yeah, I thought more than half the point was to post new things you create for fun or for your company. Of course they're going to sound like ads, the bar is whether it's interesting. It's certainly more interesting in a hobbyist/hacker/entrepreneur way than a press release about the latest version of Android.

Yes, lots of stuff linked on HN is an ad, or has been paid for by someone to convince you of something. Welcome to the internet.

This comment looks like an ad for the internet ad. We need more ADs haha

On-topic as this really cool nerdy af product is now flagged again.

It took 5 clicks and a moderate amount of reading of links to find what SoC is used (ESP32), but at least "code of conduct" is one click away.

For those interested in tech: website -> "github" -> "build one" (hidden in a wall of text) -> "I want to build a single board Tulip and know how to solder SMT" (below a huge image, at the bottom of a wall of text) -> recognize foot print or image of ESP32-s3-wroom module

The title should be "The Tulip Creative Computer"

There was a post about it with exactly that title a year ago, and it got no comments until I made one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34797041

I repeat what I wrote then -- this is very impressive! Especially that it runs Python without a conventional OS, I would expect that alone should get some attention on HN.

I would never have clicked on that title nor ever realized something like this existed. Descriptive titles can serve a purpose :)

This thing looks awesome.

lots of power for the price point! pretty cool. nice to see like . . . a creative design targeted at enabling creativity, as opposed to yet another chat bot.

This looks like great fun and the price is almost good enough to make me not care about getting yet another device, and it might get me, looks to be the perfect match for one of my projects. Nice work.

Is writing synth music in python more enjoyable or practical than a visual virtual synth like VCV Rack? Granted I don't like python, but for me writing music in pure code looks tedious.

I find most audio DSLs to be more enjoyable and practical than visual virtual synths and I am a poor excuse for a programmer who is far more comfortable with a real synth. I hate tweaking all those virtual knobs/sliders even on a touch screen and setting up a midi controller to get around that can be tedious especially when the synth in question has 300 more parameters than your controller and virtual patch cables. Audio DSLs work to a computer's strengths and take automation of parameters to a whole new level.

for loops lend themselves quite well to certain kinds of music

http://gibber.cc is a different music programming project

I would look into adding support for Mixxx and possibly getting the dev team to make a more condensed skin reflecting the GUI of EngineDJ. You can have a synth in almost any portable device now but the standalone DJ market is incredibly overpriced still, and having something i can plug my controller in top get full functionality is still not possible given the mobile dj apps are trash

Really excited to see this - very nice work Brian et al!

WOW, praise from caesar! <3

When thinking about building something like this sort of device (but on a lesser scale), I've often considered how it stacks up to something like just grabbing an old second-hand iPad. For about the same price you can grab a 2017-19 or so and expect it to mostly still work ok and do a lot more (this does win on connectivity I guess, and likely a bunch of other areas).

I see there is a desktop version prebuilt for Mac OS 10.15 or higher, or you can build it for Linux:

https://github.com/shorepine/tulipcc/blob/main/docs/tulip_de...

I build small hardware synths as a hobby and have been considering this (even if it’s pretty much prebuilt), but shipping costs add almost another 50% on top for me… It’s still a very neat project (I actually tried to submit the link a few weeks back when Floyd’s video popped up, but for some reason my sumbission didn’t stick).

Looks nice, and for a good price.

Off-topic: is it just me or it would be very hard to see anything being typed in the screen from a relatively short-medium distance? For instance here https://tulip.computer/img/tulipcc-writing.jpeg, if I put myself in the place of the one who took the picture, I can barely see what I'm typing. I guess I'm getting older.

It's not just you, there's no way I'd be able to use this.

You should run the terminal based version of Orca on this : https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

Wow, super interested. Can this be used for realtime audio, like guitar effects? Could you use this to make synths and etc? What OS is it and what CPU?

It doesn't really run an OS like you may be used to. It runs FreeRTOS, which schedules tasks. One of the tasks is running Micropython. (Other tasks are for audio, the display, MIDI, touchscreen, the sequencer, etc). There's no BIOS-level code to use, we have to manage our own screen (including drawing in groups of scanlines at a time to save RAM.)

Yes, you can use this to make synths. It's powered by our own AMY under the hood, which is a low level oscillator bank with a LOT of features https://github.com/shorepine/amy . And then you manage them in Python, including MIDI, note stealing, polyphony, sequencer, etc. See more here: https://github.com/shorepine/tulipcc/blob/main/docs/music.md

You can NOT do audio input effects -- there's no audio input. You can load samples from WAV files and play them back.

How's rust support on this?

There are ways to write Rust code for the underlying MCU -- the ESP32-S3, but Tulip itself is Micropython with a lot of C glue code to handle the audio, display, UI, and MIDI. People that get a Tulip will be writing Python on Tulip, and Tulip itself is C + Python.

python makes it a "no" for me

Ah yes, Tulip Computer(s) [1], I visited their factory in the 90's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_Computers

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