Note: This branch is an intro to creating a simple plugin using DaisySP code. Check the other branches for more advanced examples (delay lines etc)

This is a fork of VaseProto, which has been updated to work with the latest version of VCV Rack.

• Its purpose is to build a simple sine wave oscillator plugin for VCV Rack using DaisySP code
• This template can then be used as a development environment to prototype more complex modules without the Daisy hardware
• We are using this approach for our SynthLab sessions in the 42 Berlin FabLab to prototype our first hardware Eurorack module

For our plugin to compile, we need VCV Rack, the Rack SDK and Daisy SP to be installed in a project folder. In my case this is ~/Documents/SynthLab and it looks as follows:

.
├── DaisySP : digital signal processing code for the Daisy platform
├── Rack2Free : VCV Rack itself
└── Rack-SDK : the Rack Software Development Kit

For the second two items, we can follow the VCV Rack plugin development tutorial, which is recommended to get a feeling for how plugins work and are built.

To install DaisySP we can simply clone the repo into our project folder and build it. When using the Daisy hardware directly we would install the arm-none-eabi compiler and compile for the arm architecture by simply typing make. However when making a plugin we want to build for our local architecture. For this we first use cmake, as follows:

cmake .
make

If this completes, you should find the libDaisySP.a static library in the root DaisySP folder, which we will link to when compiling our VCV Rack plugin.

Now we are ready to ahead and build the plugin. Back up in your top level folder, clone this repo as follows:

git clone https://github.com/fablabnk/VaseProtoPlugin.git

Your folder structure should now look like this:

.
├── Rack2Free
├── Rack-SDK
├── DaisySP
└── VaseProtoPlugin

Go into the VaseProtoPlugin folder, edit the Makefile and provoide the correct paths to our previously downloaded tools, which should be:

RACK_DIR ?= ../Rack-SDK
DAISYSP_DIR = ../DaisySP

Also note that the LDFLAGS line is linking to our previously created libDaisySP.a file, where -L points it at the right folder, whilst -l tells us the name of the library to look for (DaisySP will repsolve to libDaisySP.a).

LDFLAGS += -L$(DAISYSP_DIR)/ -lDaisySP

Now you can go ahead and build like so:

make
make dist
make install

Here, make builds the plugin, make dist makes a distributable version and make install places it in your VCV Rack plugins folder in ~/.Rack2. When running make, some warnings are normal.

Once this is done you should be able to open VCVRack, right click and see and use your plugin. If your plugin does not appear, check ~/.Rack2/logs.txt for errors.

• When you build your plugin, an extra DaisySP folder will be created with object and dependency files in it - this is normal. The plugin Makefile has the target clean_extra to clean it up whilst still calling the original clean target
• If you have scratchy audio in VCV Rack using Ubuntu, use PulseAudio instead of ALSA

• updated plugin.json to "version": "2.4.1" (probably not necessary but nice)

in Makefile:

• Point correctly to source code in DaisySP folder (one folder up):

DAISYSP_DIR = ../DaisySP

• point the compiler to the header files daisysp.h and dsp.h:

CXXFLAGS += -I$(DAISYSP_DIR)/Source -I$(DAISYSP_DIR)/Source/Utility

• commented out the -ldaisysp flag here (I could never find what it's trying to link to here)

LDFLAGS += -L$(DAISYSP_DIR)/build # -ldaisysp

• added this line to include all the DaisySP source files (probably a bit overkill)

SOURCES += ${wildcard $(DAISYSP_DIR)/Source/**/*.cpp}

This link helped me to realise that I don't have to build DaisySP for arm: https://forum.electro-smith.com/t/daisysp-away-from-the-hardware-aka-plugins-with-juce/1106