I’ve built a playable, MIDI capable, polyphonic FM synthesizer using an 32bit ARM Cortex M0 microcontroller and an audio codec. This was a learning experience for me.
I used an ARM Cortex M0 core STM32F031 for the project. Cortex M0 cores don’t have anything really extra than having a 32×32 hardware multiplier for DSP purposes. Cortex M3 and M4/M4F have specific DSP instructions and they would have been much more helpful for such a computational intensive task, but I just wanted to try what can be done with a low cost, entry level ARM chip. That specific microcontroller also have I2S and DMA module which is essential for this project.
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