Bela Gem released

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Hi NIME community,

I’m happy to share that Bela Gem, the next generation of the Bela embedded audio platform, has launched. We are running a campaign on Crowd Supply through 30 July: Bela Gem Stereo and Multi | Crowd Supply

I hope you will forgive this bit of shameless promotion. Bela has been a part of the NIME community since before it was even called “Bela” (a few of you might remember the BeagleRT workshop from NIME 2015 in Baton Rouge). The signature features of Bela – ultra-low 1ms latency audio, hard real-time performance, 16-bit analog inputs for sensors, frame-level synchronisation between audio and sensors, open source – are directly informed by the needs of DMI designers. It’s been rewarding to see all the amazing NIME work that has been done with Bela over the years (you will find more than a few NIME projects on the Bela blog: https://blog.bela.io). In turn, Bela has sponsored several NIME conferences over the years, including sponsoring the prizes this year for NIME in Canberra.

Bela Gem is the successor to the current Bela product line. It comes in two versions, Bela Gem Stereo with 2 in / 2 out, and Bela Gem Multi with 10 in / 10 out. Compared to existing Bela boards, the hardware brings:

  • much greater processing power (quad-core 1.4GHz ARM Cortex-A53, based on PocketBeagle 2)
  • higher-spec audio (up to 24bit, 96kHz with differential inputs on some configurations)
  • DC-coupled audio outputs (8 channels on Multi, ±5V)
  • onboard TRS audio jacks, with all signals also available on pin headers for embedding

Bela Gem also features a newly rebuilt Bela IDE, with modern syntax checking and autocompletion and some new features for monitoring and controlling the values of I/O pins on the board. We’ll be posting more about the IDE as the campaign goes along.

At the link above you can subscribe to the campaign if you want more updates, as this will be my only announcement on this forum. If you want to know more about using Bela for research or teaching, you’re also welcome to drop me a line by email (andrew.mcpherson@imperial.ac.uk) or DM me on this forum.

Best wishes,
Andrew

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