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Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

IANAE but I would go for electric circuit, not electronic software that steers the led. I think that nowadays, with the LLM support it can be easier and better to optimise it for the sake of latency.

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If you want minimum latency, you want the input side of an traditional vocoder, not an FFT. This is the part that splits the modulator signal into frequency bands and puts each one through an envelope follower. Instead of using the outputs of the envelope followers to modulate the equivalent frequency bands of a carrier signal, you can use them to drive the visualizer circuit.

That can be done with analog electronics, but even half an analog vocoder needs a lot of parts. It's going to be cheaper and more reliable to simulate it in software. This uses entirely IIR filters, which are computationally cheap and calculated one sample at a time, so they have the minimum possible latency. I'd be curious if any LLM actually recognizes that an audio visualizer is half a vocoder instead of jumping straight to the obvious (and higher latency) FFT approach.

I got it to produce me an 6x lm3915 + 10x TL072CP + 18 1N4148 solution. Need to order the BOM and try it in free time

Using LLM to target an FPGA would be interesting, generate the Verilog/VHDL.

much faster, above all, but this would be electronic signal processing with quantisation etc. I am targeting zero latency purely analog circuit. I'm not sure if FPGA can do it...

For recorded music, you could always buffer however many milliseconds of audio to account for the processing.

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