[sdiy] Xilinx 3E board comments

[Jeff Farr]

Dah Well.  That would've been cool as hell tho!  perhaps the Pico
could handle doing the transfer via USB...  but this is all jumping
the gun a bit.  Where is Chris Strellis?  I'm looking at his neat
little additive synth and I think it makes for an interesting
comparison, ie: how powerful is this 3E starter kit compared to what
he realized his synth with?  I'm also wondering about what Jim
mentioned with using an external uC to control the FPGA, which
presumably saves good amount of resources, perhaps even across
multiple FPGA's (Can these things be daisy-chained?), at the expense
of connecting the them all up.  Presumably the *blaze's are optimized
to be integrated into the rest of the system (since, indeed, they are
made from the same stuff).

What about storage controllers?  Just another perephial to connect up
and code for?  I'm really getting some gears moving on making some
type of 'sampler'.. I've got some designs that I've been sitting on
for a couple years now because I just didn't have any idea where to
begin (I couldn't keep interest in software versions).  I assume a
sequencer would only occupy a trivial part of the system resources,
perhaps living in the picoblaze itself.

I've read a few of the .pdf's at xilinx now, and I can see that there
is a learning curve to their documentation (and where they keep their
documentation).

Lastly I assume that once you have a finished design on a FPGA you
would move on to another process that creates a commercial product
from the design ie:  a NordLead may have been created using a FPGA,
but there is not a FPGA in a NordLead.

Ok, one more:  In terms of processing power where do dsp chips fit in?
 Would I be achieving a similar result using a uC and some DSP chips,
given that I sacrifice a great deal of flexibilty?



... and I'm still mulling this "sampling module" idea.  Not making an
entire sampler to fit into a modular, just a sampling oscillator /
phrase recorder connected up to the proper analog I/O to fit in with
the rest of the system.   Oh yea.. might as well add granular
capabilty to it.. and vectors... hell, why not wave sequencing..
anything else?