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Comment by alowell | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm Alex, I made ETH-68. I didn't create the post here on HN but I will answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments

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Is this open source? I’ve been working on https://codeberg.org/olpad/openmic which is in the more traditional domain of USB audio interfaces, but I’d be interested in taking a look at the internals of the ETH-68

Nice project. Have you tried measuring the round trip audio latency on Linux?

I’m still working towards a first prototype, development has been slow due to my own schedule. But I’d expect round trip latency near what you’d expect from a USB interface. It would be cool to add ethernet support in the future though!

Thank you for taking the time to write up the work properly. It's quite refreshing to read content like this after what's been the standard fare that's been posted here at HN.

Thank you very much for this comment. TBH when I made the post on r/linuxaudio, I figured there was a chance it would get drowned out by all the AI generated VST posts but fortunately that wasn’t the case

First off, very cool project and great article showcasing it! Why does it also have MIDI?

Thank you! You’re right, I didn’t discuss the MIDI implementation in the blog post. Right now it’s a little primitive but functional. Each MIDI message (e.g 3 byte note-on message) maps to 1 UDP packet. I have a simple script on the host side that interfaces these UDP packets with an ALSA loopback MIDI interface.

As someone who uses a USB equivalent to this piece of hardware (in my case, a Behringer UMC1820): having MIDI and audio inputs on the same interface is a nice convenience feature. Avoids needing to use up multiple ports on the host machine, and avoids a lot of the time synchronization issues that arise with trying to use multiple interfaces at once.

Probably for the same reason MADI also has MIDI, for sending control messages.

Is it actually for sale or otherwise obtainable?

Not yet but actively figuring out what to do about that!

hello Alex,

tech nerd/musician here, I would be very interested in this! do you have an email list or something I can sign up for? this is fantastic, and if the $$$ is not crazy, I would want this for sure.

What's your use case where you want more outputs than inputs? At home I run a Audiofuse 16Rig with a lot of ADAT expansion to get 32i/32o, but I only use like 6o, while every input is used.

The project just exposes everything the hardware can do, the audio codec chip used for the conversion is Burr-Brown PCM3168A 24-Bit, 96-kHz/192-kHz, 6-In/8-Out.

Some I can imagine are surround sound, multiple monitor pairs (including dedicated monitoring channels for different musicians or simply different outputs for mixing).

FYI your domain is marked "newly seen" on cloudflare, which results in it being blocked by Ubiquiti Unifi domain filtering.

  $ dig NS naturalsystems.io @1.1.1.1
  [...]
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  [...]
  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  naturalsystems.io.      3600    IN      SOA     block.unifi.local. 0. 7200 900 1209600 86400 0

You can submit to have it re-categorized using the link below.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains/feedback/naturalsystems...

That's an user problem, isn't it? Why a niche site owner consider caring about proprietary Ubiquiti systems?

Well, it's certainly a dumb situation that I don't like that's created by my employer (and many others with similar setups), but it takes only two clicks to pick a category to make it available to folks behind these firewalls.

I went ahead and chose "blog" because it sounds like it's a blog. Apparently the "newly seen domains" category goes away on its own after 30 days, so that would have fixed itself, though then it would have been "uncategorized" and still blocked.

If only one of us had access to better ways to address this problem, oh well

> That's an user problem, isn't it?

Yes. And no. The affected users usually have no control over the situation, so if the site owner cares at all that those people can't access it, then it is effectively their problem as they can potentially do something about it.

If neither party cares enough, then it is nobody's problem.

The affected users can stop using brain damaged systems.

P.S. By the way, to paraphrase an OS developer, Cloudflare, fuck you for "Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access thunderbird.net".

> The affected users can stop using brain damaged systems.

Often not, because as I said in what you replied to:

> The affected users usually have no control over the situation

The affected users are usually on devices controlled by others or on their own devices connected through networks controlled by others: at work, in schools, in libraries, etc. The affected users and the those configuring the "new site" block (or leaving it on by default) are not the same set in many cases.

My work users such a filter, there is nothing I can do on their laptop to get around it¹, though my phone newer connects to their network so I can just look at things that way if I care to.

--------

[1] OK, there are things I could do, but they would be an abuse of the admin level access I have on the machine, because some things needed for my job don't work properly without that, and it isn't worth that arguement if noticed!

I would ask the employee, the school whatever to stop using them. Or at least inform me somehow about what's going on.

That's pretty much it. I wouldn't have mentioned it if not for the fact that it's easy to fix and for users it just looks like the site is down, which is not uncommon for small projects posted to HN.

I guess some people thought I liked cloudflare or something... that's definitely not the case.

"easy to fix" is relative. This "new domain equals bad" thinking has spread in the IT security world. My corporate anti-virus blocks them too and I see it a lot while browsing HN on the job.

The only real solution, as a "holder of a young domain" is to wait 30 days before you use it.

Might you do clock synchronization via PTP in the future?

Possibly. The STM32H7 Ethernet MAC does have IEEE 1588 support, although I've heard that it is not straightforward to use.

Unrelated question: what is the keyboard on the last picture of the post?

Keychron, Q1 I think?

Why not XLR?

XLR is generally for microphones, TRS is typically used for line level and instruments (hi-z)

They're basically interchangeable. But yeah TRS is more compact and more normative when there is no preamp. Some monitors I've seen have xlr inputs though, even though they expect line level input.

Another option is to just use XLR/TRS combo jacks if you want to support both, but that’s not really any different than the user using an XLR to TRS cord or converter

XLR and combo XLR/TRS tend to be significantly pricier, which matters since there are 14x in the BOM.

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