[sdiy] sdiy dsp board?

[Metrophage]

--- Tim Ressel <madhun2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've lost track: is there an effort to develop a DSP
> board for use by this group?

Only occaisional PIC and Amtel projects, so far as I recall. AVRsynth
mostly.
 
> Here is my wish list for a GP DSP board:
> 
> Suitable for development or use in a module
> At least 2 analog ins and 2 analog outs
> Front-end uP for handling midi, knobs, etc
> Enough memory and speed to handle our needs
> Flashing lights (geek requirement)

Closest to a platform for DSP for music are the projects of DSPerado:
Noah Vawter and Brian Whitman. They have long offered interface
schematics, loading and monitoring software, and lots of fun sounding
audio code for the Analog Devices EZ-Kit Lite 21XX. Since then they
have made their own board called Chiclet, and are now working on a
development platform for more current ADI DSP chips.

Problem is that they are busy MIT students, so their music projects
come along when they have the time. Also, they seem worried about
letting their projects loose into the wild. They developed the PushPin
MIDI cartridge for Gameboy, but have decided after a lot of hype to not
release it. They made their Chiclet DSP board, but don't want to need
to "support" people's use of it. I guess I think it's funny because I
cannot relate to their apprehension. Couldn't they sell Chiclets with
the stipulation of no support? They are so timid!

< http://www.gweep.net/~shifty/death/ >
< http://www.dsperado.com/chiclet/ >
< http://www.dspmusic.org/chiclet.html >

Cool stuff though. Lots of code to check out. I was going to try making
a "death synth" a couple of years ago, the old 21XX EZ-Kit was long
deprecated by newer DSP evaluation kits, and became fairly inexpensive
($100-$150?). Then in 2003 for whatever reason they decided to double
the price of the kit. So now one is definately better off spending the
same amount of money on a modern DSP. I bought an ADSP 2189 kit which I
was going to try to adapt for these projects, but it was less robust
than its predecessor with less memory and crappy codec - so I sold it,
decided to hold off.

There are lots of DSP kits out there, and people using them for music.
The evaluation boards from Analog Devices and Motorola are quite
popular. As for me, I need a far better understanding of the data
structures involved and some math before DSP code might make any sense
to me. Writing some DSP plugins is probably the cheapest way to test
such ideas.

CJ


	
		
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