If you’ve never heard of the Spin Semiconductors FP-1 digital signal processor chip, don’t worry– that just means you haven’t been deep into guitar petals and audio effects hardware lately. [adamjvr], a.k.a. [avr] has, and he’s gone to the point of creating a PC-based emulator of this sound chip to simplify development.
If you don’t see the utility, stop and think about the development cycle without a simulation like this: you program, you flash to a board, and you test there. Not only does the ‘flash to the board’ step add time and friction, you do also have a limited number of flashes on the board’s memory. With an emulator on your PC, the workflow tightens to ‘code, test’ and you don’t flash the board until the simulated DSP is doing the sounds you want it to.
As for the FV-1 itself, it’s an interesting little chip in that it’s quite a full-featured DSP– rather, it’s small instruction set is focused entirely on audio effects. If you’re into that world– be it guitar pedals or otherwise– you may find this project very useful. There are releases for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it’s all open-source on GitHub, under the Mozilla Public License. It’s not the most common choice, but we’re hardly going to complain about licenses to anyone willing to share their hard work.
If you like the idea of testing your work before you go to the bench, we’ve seen software that offer the same functionality for Arduino projects, as well as other AVR and PIC micros. It’s been a while since we featured a programmable guitar pedal, so we hope this tool enables others to rock out.
“you haven’t been deep into guitar petals and audio effects hardware”
right.
Right. FV-1 is decades old. I think I was using one in the 2000’s and even then it was “old”. I got into Teesny shortly after that and I have never bothered going anywhere else since. That was in South Africain a garage. Not even close to some tech hub.
Teesny?
You dont use a devboard that costs a shitload of money compared to a chip that is dedicated to this purpose?
wow you’re so cool. we’re all very impressed.
Right. FV-1 is decades old. I tried FV-1 development in the 2010’s. It was old then already. I moved to teensy shortly after that and I am not on the cutting edge of any tech hub in South Africa in a garage. https://youtu.be/EMt3JmPlWH8?is=Upwl48QdIkHSUf5D
The prose does seem a bit too flowery.
Might be a good STEM project?
Purple is my favourite colour.
Not to diminish adamjvr’s effort, but SpinCAD Designer has been around for a while.
https://github.com/HolyCityAudio/SpinCAD-Designer
Very cool!
We have also developed our own tools (heavily inspired by SpinCAD) as a VS Code extension as well as a web-based simulator/programmer for our Easy Spin guitar pedal (https://audiofab.com/store/easy-spin-pedal).
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-audiofab.fv1-vscode
It features a real-time simulator, syntax highlighting, source-level debugger and visual block diagram editor for graphically creating your own effects. We also recently added an MCP server so you can just ask Claude/CoPilot to create an effect for you by describing what you want.
It really is amazing there are so many options for the FV-1 still being developed to this day! If Keith Barr could only see the community that he has inspired!
Cheers,
Mark
I’m the author of SpinCAD Designer. I must acknowledge Andrew Kilpatrick’s ElmGen Java library which simulates the FV-1 (but without a UI) as the necessary pioneering work which made it possible. https://www.kilpatrickaudio.com/?p=contact
Yes, more powerful chips are available these days but the FV-1 carved itself a unique place in history. I can still read FV-1 assembler, which is more than I can say for the Kanji I studied a few years back.
Wow i could have used this 20 years ago! This chips must be EOL no?