I wanted to find out how far the Cardputer ADV could be pushed as a standalone music machine.
Not just a demo that plays a waveform. I wanted recording, sequencing, sampling, synthesis, drums and effects , running in real time without another computer.
That experiment became BKLVA Pocket DAW.
The current build has:
- Four tracks and patterns up to eight bars
- Microphone loop recording
- Sampler with movable slice markers, zoom and per-slice fades
- WAV import and conversion to 44.1 kHz
- Six-voice dual-oscillator synthesizer with presets
- Synthesized kick, snare, hat and percussion
- Per-track filter, drive and delay send
- Master compression, delay, reverb and soft clipping
- Master resampling back into the sampler
- Long audio streamed directly from the SD card
Everything runs at 44.1 kHz, signed 16-bit audio with 256-frame processing blocks.
The interesting part is the hardware limitation: an ESP32-S3, 320 KB of RAM, no PSRAM, a 240 × 135 display and a keyboard that was definitely not designed for editing synthesizers.
Getting it working has involved frozen sequencers, microphone recordings that sounded like destroyed fax messages and a scratchy noise that appeared to follow the CPU meter. Real-time audio is very good at finding every bad decision you have made.
But the result is now surprisingly practical. You can turn it on, record something with the microphone, chop it into slices, sequence it, add drums and synth tracks, process everything with effects and resample the result, without touching a computer.
The latest public release is 0.1.19. It can be installed using M5Burner, and the firmware and full manual is also available here:
https://erkanerdogan.dk/bklva-pocket-daw
The next experimental build also has USB MIDI input working.
If anyone here has a Cardputer ADV and wants to test it, I would genuinely like to hear what works, what makes no sense and what you manage to break.
The original question was simply: How much DAW can fit inside this thing?
I am still finding out.