[sdiy] The Chameleon Guitar

[Eric Brombaugh]

Csaba Zvekan wrote:
> This is really cool idea . Are there any other projects with the 
> SoundBite board?  I happened to have that board too as some of you as 
> well. I was wondering if we can get more out of the SoundBite board than 
> just the demo tones and passthrough .
> Has anybody digged some more into the DSP56371.
> Maybe we can set up some sort of a repository and share our codes . Kind 
> of like Line6 is doing with their DSP based ToneCore stampbox .
> Always interested in making some noisy boxes :)

The guy at Freescale who spearheaded the SoundBite board was pretty 
enthusiastic and posted a lot of support material on the Freescale site. 
I think Paul Maddox was pretty serious about trying to do some things 
with it for a while and set up a forum for it that seems to have been 
shut off now.

The biggest problem with the SoundBite board was the fairly complex 
development environment (Eclipse + OpenOCD + GCC) and a lack of standard 
I/O devices. The DSP chip has some GPIO and a host SPI port, but no 
ADCs, UARTs, etc. It would make a good peripheral under the control of 
another chip for MIDI processing and/or CVs & knobs, but that requires 
addition hardware work.

Although the development tools are C-based, using the DSP capability of 
the processor requires getting down into the assembly language. Not 
impossible, but you do have to learn yet another processor architecture.

Overall it's a pretty big pile of stuff to absorb. Fun if you're into it 
but I had other things to do. :)

Eric