The CVA is Evolving!
The CVA controller continues to evolve. The original CVA was a proof of concept (C-I, C-II, C-III, and C-IV were all based upon PIC architecture; C-V was based upon ARM, thus CVA). The controller worked better than we could have imagined. It set new milestones in performance and despite the sky being the limit in software, the hardware was starting to feel cramped and undeveloped. A few features quickly became obvious as being needed:
Place to plug in hall effect key strips directly. The Opus-Two Hall Effect keystrips have not been mass market available because of the difficulty in making fine adjustments, but the Opus-ARM OS allows significantly improved configuration options and has successfully been used to bring legacy sites up to speed.
Additional A/D inputs for swell shoes.
Futureproof ports (such as Ethernet).
More PipeBus ports with interrupt support for sites with remote data collection or multiple consoles.
Additional MIDI functionality (this was waiting for announcements about the future of MIDI).
These items (and more) have led to the development of a CVA-M4, which is based on a Cortex M4 processor. This is yet another large leap in processing capabilities over the original CVA (which was, itself, a significant jump from the PIC architecture).
The CVA M4 is entering beta testing and will be used on beta sites in the near future.