Just got a PO-33 and very psyched with it, though I've had some thoughts about whether you couldn't leverage the LCD a bit better to shift it from semi-serious to fully serious. E.g. right now in the sequencer it's impossible to know which specific instrument is playing. Anyway, it would have been really cool to have the OS be open and flashable and spend a little bit of time to make little papercuts like that better. I was looking into how hard it would be to put something like csound in a tiny board and make my own, but when I look at how minimal that single header file synth is, I'm left wondering if that's too much.
I don't know about CSound, but Faust works well on microcontrollers, in fact that's one of its main use cases. Note that Faust focuses more on DSP, synthesis and effects, not so much on sequencing and higher-level music organization. I've found combining Faust (for low level) with any general-purpose language (for high level) works well for a lot of things.
Theres some in-depth breakdowns for the PO 12,14,16 here(http://hackingthepo.weebly.com/) if you're interested!
I have no idea about the po33 and if the juice is worth the squeeze, but they're cheap enough to tear apart so go for it.
Very neat, thanks - probably this is just enough beyond my abilities that it'd probably be me bricking my PO rather than accomplishing anything useful :-)
The screen is the least of the differences. Looks cool, but not as closely related as you'd think. The PO33 is much more of a toy with all the good and bad that comes with that. I can hand it to my 8 year old and she can enjoy it, but it also makes a great sidekick on a commute or in a waiting room.
