Glitchy start with my kit

Glitchy start with my kit all You Rockers!

So, I waited a bit after getting my board since the Hdays were buzzy for me too and seemed like the wizards of Elk were still getting stuff to github apon my hardware arrival… any-hooo I finally flashed a new chip with the release distro plus did the .swu. Peaches. Ssh in and tally ho! Green retro Elk graphics. Koolio babes.

Then to try to see what this magic board has in those silicon turbines I:

sushi -r -c ~/config_files/mda-vst3-configs/config_mda_synth.json &

And nada. I don’t even get my cursor back with the magic in ‘&’.

Reboot. Same. Did a quick search of the forum and I see a lot of you having better luck than I. So I must be doing something wrong.

Any ‘tips’ or is it all iceberg from here on out…

Hi @ScreenBurn,
very weird you don’t get your prompt back.

Sorry for the obvious question, did you try to just press Enter?

Does the system react to anything else? You can try to launch SUSHI in foreground (without & at the end) and see if there are any issues.

Other ways of working through the command line and avoiding managing the background task are:

  1. Having more than one SSH session open
  2. Use tmux to manage multiple virtual terminals from the same SSH session. Just google “tmux cheat sheet” or similar, the basic commands are very easy to use.

Ok. I’m gonna keep trying the simple stuff but woah nelly… burning a new ssd card now. Used sudo shutdown -h now to turn the gizmo off,saw you all like sudo poweroff?.. does poweroff do more than shutdown? Gonna have to change some habits I guess.

I’ll try SUSHI with no args and see where the chips fall. Also poke around a bit more before searching for easy answers. But hey thanks for suggesting I just press enter and yeah I’m still getting used to ssh again. My headless pis all run X11. Maybe I can get that working as an early contrib if no one has done it already.

Ping yah lattah.

Getting X11 to work on top of Elk is actually not trivial at all.

Furthermore, current image doesn’t have GPU acceleration, so it will be terribly slow.

But why do you need to run X11 on a headless system? To use SSH with X forward?

Hi Stefano,
Oh, didn’t mean that sorry, i have a pi2 that I ssh into and then run pd. It opens X11 on my mac and I go from there. The pi3 I’m using now for the Elk used to run in the same way…

Anyhow, I’m back up to where I was. Poked around a bit more and went to run sushi in the fg. And … see I’ve never run sushi b4 and I don’t know if it’s working. Shouldn’t I see a rudimentary GUI at this point?

Btw, no synth pugged in at all.

Also, thinking my 2.1 amp power supply might not enough. Does the pi plus Elk hat draw more than that? Guessing that firing up the Elk might yank too many amp. Noticed you guys recommend a 2.5 amp ps.

Hi!

Have you tried following the specific steps in our getting started guide?

I am referring to starting sushi with a plugin (the only way - you cannot load one after sushi runs), and connecting a MIDI device to it with aconnect.

There is no GUI for sushi at all from our end, that’s what we mean by headless - it runs entirely through the command line.

Best,
Ilias of Elk

IIlias,

Thanks. And yes. I figured that out. And command line driven is more precise. After I did aconnect -l last night and saw sushi running I got into the python examples and figured things out for myself.

The kick in the mind as a developer for me is how long it’s taken someone with an expert grasp on programming but a novice grasp on Elk to have a hello world moment with your sdk. That’s not a negative towards anyone but me I want you to know that. I see lots of folks doing well with this kit but when I read back on their posts it’s seems they had an Elk relationship long before these cool hats went out. I think for me I should have taken a moment to learn more about your software architecture before opting in.

For what it’s worth I’m not a midi guy. I do audio and compression. What drew me to your board was 6 channels of 192k 24bit audio output because I have an audio compression codec that I wanted to integrate into a multi channel system.