Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-27. Living revisions and interconnected notes live in the Stax Digital Garden.
SDR Waterfall Rendering via WebGL Fragment Shaders and Web Audio
Processing high-bandwidth spectrum captures in client browsers typically chokes single-threaded JavaScript runtimes. Pipelining Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) bins directly into WebGL textures enables smooth 60 FPS waterfall spectrum navigation.
GPU Acceleration Pipeline
- Floating-Point Texture Streams: Discrete Fourier bins stream as raw 32-bit float textures directly to GPU buffers.
- Fragment Shader Color Mapping: Pixel shaders map signal decibel intensity to thermal color spectrum lookups in parallel.
- AudioContext Loopback: Demodulated narrowband audio routes through Web Audio API worklets without blocking canvas layout threads.
By shifting digital signal processing and waterfall scroll mechanics to GPU fragment shaders, terminal consoles maintain liquid rendering responsiveness.
- Directus Target: hushwire-blog
- Garden Source Reference: MOC - hushwire-telemetry, MOC - Data Liberation Workbenches, TND-1013 - Epoll and Kqueue Event Polling