Ann: AKP Successfully Completes Placement to raise A$10m, page-4

Several people have the video floating around on here. I hope someone who downloaded it can share a link - you can upload a video on websites like ufile without an account.

The apparatus is an older single-chip board with external high-voltage driver and an FPGA streaming data to the chip. So not with the integrated ASIC. The limited memory on the Altera FPGA board means this setup can only play about 20 seconds of sound at a time - it is an engineering tool, not a device designed to process and stream the gigabytes of data that is required to play continuously. The algorithms that coordinate the 1024 pixel array are run on the computer in MATLAB and then the resulting commands are sent to the FPGA, stored in memory on that board, and then streamed to the chip when ready.

The video confirmed, yet again, that the chips work and produce high-quality sound. We already knew this from previous announcements. What is exciting to me is the latest announcement that the $10MM raised is partly earmarked for marketing.

Presumably there are multiple algorithms being tested to figure out the best ways to coordinate the thousands of individual elements (which now have variable power, not merely on/off). I assume once they are happy with their choice of how to coordinate the pixel elements, they will then write new code that will be highly optimised and capable of streaming audio in real time into AudioPixel commands. That program would run on the powerful CPUs that are used in mobile phones etc, rather than inside the engineering environment of MATLAB.