Icarus for Organelle

In winter of 2024, I had been spending time learning supercollider and more about how the Organelle works. This project stems from a thread here on the Critter & Guitari forum where somebody mentioned that now that Organelle supports Supercollider (SC) it should in theory be possible to bring over some of the sounds from monome norns, seeing as norns patches leverage SC for their sound engine.

The code for the sound engine here has only minimal modifications from the SynthDef implemented by @infinitedigits for norns- but everything else here is new! Norns has 3 encoders and 3 buttons, and a screen with 15 levels of grayscale brightness. (it also has no built-in keyboard or mic). Furthermore, graphics and app definition on Norns are in Lua and… I didn’t know enough about Lua or norns (in 2024!) to make this an “easy” conversion UI wise. So I have reimplemented the UX for Icarus from scratch in SC. There is no Lua here, and no puredata here.

I also had to implement a “mother” of sorts for my patch that provides easy to use interfaces for the Organelle hardware. I had hoped when building this that the mother.scd included with this patch is something others can use to get started doing more complicated things with SC on Organelle (which, recently as of the time of writing in 2026, they have!).

Dependency wise there was a bunch to do here. Sclang is not in the right place where MainMenu.cpp looks for it in Organelle OS, and jackd (a core dependency that was present on OG1) is not natively installed on Organelle M/S. In order to get this stuff working, the deploy.sh script for this patch installs jackd from apt-get (including updating sources.list in order to make that work since the built in sources are out of date).

This project also has some additional work to do to gain compatibility with both the new Organelle S2 hardware and the latest Organelle OS. It is on my to-do list, I promise!