the Elk audio hat and the Blackboard have been lying around unused in my crafting corner since 2019.
I’m still kind of undecided about what I really want to accomplish with this stack of absolutely fine hardware.
What I can see, is that most of the software I would like to run on this hardware is not supported.
Supercollider, for example.
IMHO there are two ways of bringing SC to live on ELK.
1.) A real port to Raspa.
There are several platform implementations in the Supercollider server/scsynth directory.
There is a Bela implementation, which also uses some Xenomai specific things.
2.) A bridge from ALSA or Jack to Raspa.
On several Linux distros, Pipewire is becoming more popular. Pipewire can replace ALSA or Jack and offers several ways to wire re-wire applications to Pipewire.
I think this could be done for Raspa also.
I want to place my answer in context first: Elk Audio OS is meant to compete, in computational efficiency and latency performance, not with “maker” platforms like the Bela, as much as with DSP chips used commercially in instruments and effects.
So while Elk Audio OS is much easier to develop for than those DSP platforms, it will not be as easy and flexible as Bela - with the major advantage though, that Elk in returns has extremely low latency, and very high computational efficiency - you get a lot more out of your processor.
For the same reason we don’t support ALSA and Jack audio - we interface directly with the audio codec instead.
With the above in mind, we provide the ability to load VST plugins x-compiled for the platform, and that is already far easier to develop for than the aforementioned DSP chips.
We have also tested the use of Faust to create plugins that run on Elk.
I don’t know if there’s anything similar for SuperCollider, and what support there is for x-compilation, but that might be a way if you feel up for testing it?