Community Member Spotlight - dreamer

Danny Turner · 6/24/26

Last month, we interviewed community resource lead Takumi Ogata – the educational voice behind Daisy’s YouTube channel and technical support for our online community. However, the Daisy community itself also has some very important members, and few are as influential as Alexander Chalikiopoulos, better known online by his alias “dreamer”.

A constant and trusted presence across the Daisy forum and Discord channel, dreamer has become one of the community’s most valuable contributors, helping beginners troubleshoot projects while supporting advanced developers to push Daisy hardware to its limits. 

Beyond community support, dreamer is also a contributor to plugdata, a popular visual programming environment for programming Daisy audio devices. He also maintains the HVCC compiler, an important tool that enables Pure Data patches to run on Daisy and other embedded hardware targets. 

Through his technical expertise, patience, and willingness to help others, dreamer plays a vital role in keeping the Daisy ecosystem collaborative, accessible, and inspiring for makers, musicians, and developers alike.

Interview

DT: Alexander, it’s great to be able to connect with you and discuss your contribution to the Daisy forum and Discord channel. There’s some indication you’re involved in academia in the Netherlands. Can you share a bit about your professional background and how it connects to your open-source work?

dreamer: Although I have a scientific master’s degree and worked for a physics simulation start-up after graduation, I haven't actually been involved in academia since university. During my bachelor’s degree, however, I started learning about Linux and used a lot more open-source software, which eventually led me to pursue a minor in computer science. What began as casually participating in community chat rooms and offering support slowly evolved into testing other people's projects and expanding my interests and involvement with the wider ecosystem.

DT: What initially drew you into working with embedded audio hardware and musical instrument design? 

dreamer: Since I was young, I've always played instruments, but around 10 years ago I got into electronic music. At the time, the Axoloti project [an open-source hardware and software platform designed for creating custom digital audio instruments and effects] promised a modern equivalent to the Nord Modular synthesizer, which was really interesting to me. I initially wanted to make guitar effects, but quickly learned about other synthesis techniques, and things evolved from there.

DT: You’re widely known as a very active and helpful presence on the Electro-Smith Daisy Forum. How did you first get involved with the Daisy ecosystem? 

dreamer: During one of the Covid lockdowns in early 2021, I stumbled on the Heavy Compiler project because I was looking for ways to program audio plugins for the MOD guitar pedal platform. First, I started to update the project by collecting other improvements that people had made and integrating them into a single codebase. At the time, Electro-Smith had already made a basic integration, and if I remember correctly, I contacted them to see if we could make some improvements to it.

DT: Do you remember your first Daisy project, and did it go the way you expected?

dreamer: Although I’d been running tests for deploying to Daisy, I hadn't really built any specific projects with it until the SynthUX Academy did a Synthmas challenge in late 2023, inviting people to come up with a project based on the MPR121 touch sensor. I basically ordered the sensor and made a simple "handpan”-like instrument in a cardboard box. 

That was a lot of fun, but we ran into a bug! Originally, I had a Dattorro reverb at the end, which meant that I needed to use the bootloader for extra memory. Unfortunately, combining the bootloader with the MPR121 didn't work and the patch started crashing, so in the final project I had to scrap the reverb and just use the synth sound.

DT: At what point did you decide to start actively helping others on the forum and Discord?

dreamer: Ever since I first got online around the turn of the century, I've spent a lot of time on web forums, so interacting with users felt quite natural to me. As soon as I saw people posting about using our integration with Daisy, I felt a responsibility to help out. 

plugdata - a visual programming environment for audio

DT: You’re a contributor to plugdata, which has become very popular in the Daisy community. How did your involvement with that begin? 

dreamer: The plugdata project started around the same time I started taking over the Heavy Compiler endeavor. After some time, I got in touch with Timothy Schoen - the main developer - and discovered that he actually lives very close to me, so we met up at a local hackerspace a few times and brainstormed on how we could collaborate. 

He already had some experience with Daisy during his graduation year of music technology, so together we came up with a strategy to integrate the Heavy Compiler with a special toolchain and "compiled mode" inside of plugdata. That made it much easier for users to start exporting their projects without specialized knowledge of how to set up such tooling themselves.

Pure Data

DT: For the uninitiated, can you explain what plugdata is, how it relates to Pure Data, and how it differs from writing audio code in something like C++ or Python?"

dreamer: Plugdata is a wrapper around Pure Data - a visual programming language that started in the ‘90s and offers a modern interface and user experience. One really nice feature is that it can also run as a plugin, so users can bring it into their regular music creation workflow within a DAW.

Another advantage of visual programming is that you can quickly iterate over ideas. For example, if you want to try connecting two different parts of a program, you simply draw a cable and hear the effect instantly. In C++ or other lower-level, text-based programming languages, this is not as easy to do.

DT: Compared to more traditional workflows, what do you see as the biggest advantages of using plugdata for people building on Daisy hardware? 

dreamer: The biggest advantage is the quick iteration and immediate feedback. Some users are more visually inclined, so it’s easier for them than using a text-based system. For certain DSP programs, like reverberation networks, it can also help to see the graphical layout because it can offer a layer of higher-level understanding and intuition compared to working with lower-level code.

DT: What role does the Heavy Compiler play in the plugdata-to-Daisy workflow?

dreamer: The Heavy Compiler is the central tool that converts the Pure Data patch into C/C++ and wraps it for the Daisy platform. It only emulates PD behavior, but we get very close to the same result.

DT: You maintain HVCC on GitHub. What does that day-to-day responsibility actually look like, and what keeps you motivated to do it?"

dreamer: A lot of the work involves clean-up and refactoring – in other words, trying to make the codebase more modern and legible. Personally, it also means trying to understand how it all actually works. Since I didn't write the original code, there is a lot of exploration and learning about new concepts. 

There are several things that motivate the work. On the one hand, my own experiments enable me to find out where we might need an improvement or tool change, but I’m also motivated when I hear from other people using it in their projects. For me, it's very cool that we can affect each other positively!

DT: If someone new wants to contribute to tools like plugdata or HVCC, what’s a good way for them to get started?

dreamer: The first thing they can do is use the tool and report issues/bugs or ideas/features on GitHub, but another important area is helping other users to get started or to try to write or improve existing documentation. Then, if you’re feeling bold, you might want to look at existing reports and submit new code that fixes or improves specific tools.

DT: What kinds of questions or problems from Daisy forum users do you find yourself most often helping with? 

dreamer: What seems to be most difficult for new users is to understand some of the limitations that come with these tools. Heavy doesn't implement PD directly – it’s just a kind of emulation of a PD patch, which requires experience to understand or get a feeling for.

Alongside that, working on an embedded platform like Daisy comes with its own limitations in the form of memory and, of course, hardware, so the friction that new users experience is probably what requires the most attention. There’s a lot that goes into making tools as seamless for users as possible, but whether simple or elaborate, it’s very cool to see such a wide range of projects and ideas emerge from the community.

DT: How do you balance your time between community support, software development, and any academic or professional responsibilities? 

dreamer: This year, I was lucky to get a small grant from NLNet to work on the Heavy Compiler. That means that, together with some savings, I've been able to work on the project full-time, which includes community support and developing new features. The project is now nearing its end, so I’ll have to look for some steady income again soon.

DT: What most excites you about the Daisy ecosystem and where do you see it heading in the next few years?

dreamer: A lot of us are looking forward to finally having EU distribution, which will make it much easier for those of us in Europe to obtain Daisy boards. It's also really nice that the Seed2 DFM is now accessible for individuals working on smaller projects.

Of course, there’s also speculation about the next generation of Daisy hardware, but I hope we’ll at least see the same compatibility so that transitioning or supporting all iterations will not be too difficult.

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We hope you enjoyed our interview with dreamer and invite you to become part of the Daisy community via the Electrosmith website.