I’m curious…
Just how much time was involved to develop Shruthi?
From concept to hardware, coding, finalizing the coding, creating a Manual and be at the point ready to “mass” produce the kits that were sold by MI back in the day.
Was it done in a week? A month? A year??
Development started in February 2010, and the first batch of kits was sold in September 2010.
The May 2010 - September 2010 period was mostly building the library of presets, bug fixing, and seeing how well several people did at building it.
I had a full time job at that time, so I worked only on week-ends.
The codebase was not conceptually different, and many things were figured out code-wise during the development of its predecessor (even though the Shruthi was the first in the MI lineage to be totally free of any Arduino legacy).
From all this, it’s hard to come with a single number, but overall, I would say it was several (say, three to six) months worth of work.
Thank you for the detailed reply!
I greatly appreciate you sharing your experience.
You mentioned a predecessor:
I was not aware of a product or project that preceeded Shruthi.
Any idea how much time/effort was put into it?
Purpose of my query is that I’ve been working on a possible Udemy classroom/video course to teach how to build and code a open source monosynth using a STM32F411 Blackpill and PCM5102 DAC. Maybe $20-$30 in parts total, (retail/end user prices with shipping via AliExpress/Ebay/Amazon).
The classes focus on the very basics of MIDI/UART, Digital Phase Incremented Osc’s, DMA streaming I2S data to the DAC, ADSR’s, loads of modulators, some basic digital filtering, digital delay/phaser, arpeggiator and minBlep filtering with HardSync.
It essentially takes a student by the hand and goes thru how the math works in the functions to produce the essentials of Direct Digital Synthesis.
I work fulltime myself. It’s taking me almost three months so far to write up a “script” for the videos, which is basically a book/tech manual. I’d say I’m about 2/3 done (if I can get myself to stop CHANGING/ADDING features to the synth while I write it!)
It took me nearly 2 years to learn from scratch how to flash code to the uC’s, grasp the basic DSP code and even learning how to write more complex code in C than a basic “blinky” sketch.
Point is, I was wondering to myself if I was spending too much time on this project… that I needed to quit tweaking the thing and just get the job done.
To be honest, some code was actually much needed improvement in efficiency due to my inexperienced kludging of code vs. actual new features. IE I did not see the problems (and figure a fix) until I gained more experience.
Funny thing though is the worst of the “bad code” I fixed was in the Example Code I learned from!
It was called Shruti, I started at this point with no experience in embedded systems and electronics (but a lot of experience with music software).
The digital/software side took about two months to figure out, the analog side two (it was a mish-mash of a copy-pasted CEM3379 application diagram, output amp, and power supply - in retrospect, not much, but I learnt Eagle, board design, how to breadboard things, etc).
Sounds like total time from start of Shruti until a finished kit for Shruthi is about 1 year.
I imagine it probably took another year of time for education/experience with music software to get to a point of understanding the basics of digital synths in order to write custom software.
If so, then I don’t feel so bad for as long as it has taken me from zero knowledge to where I am now.
It was a damn-good first attempt Emilie! 
(hard to believe over a decade has passed…)
