ChucK-in-the-Box

A minimalist approach to live coding

Introduction

I have always been fascinated by the two extremes in computing: the very large and the very small. I’ve worked with computers as large as 1980s scientific supercomputers and as small as the Raspberry Pi Pico.

ChucK-in-the-Box resides on a small computer - the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This $15US (2025 dollars) single-board computer isn’t the smallest I’ve ever programmed, but it is certainly the most powerful per dollar.

The fastest computer I ever used in the 1980s had a peak speed of 341 million 64-bit floating-point operations per second in assembly language and took up as much space as two refrigerators. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W peaks at 1.74 billion 64-bit floating-point operations per second in C. That’s about five times as fast! And most signal processing calculations can be done in 32-bit floating point, which is twice as fast on this board.