[sdiy] dsPIC fun board

[Eric Brombaugh]

Nothing is free :) Here are some of the tradeoffs:

* You're free to use the board artwork with any PCB manufacturer that 
takes the 8mil line/space rules I used to lay out this board. Getting a 
board from BatchPCB in the US will cost you about $35 if I remember 
correctly. Other vendors may be less expensive.

* The demo firmware is stripped down - it only provides basic control of 
the dsPIC peripherals, so if you want to do anything fancy you'll have 
to figure it out yourself.

* Use MPLAB for assembly or C coding, or dsPIC GCC if you want a more 
open-source approach.

* Arduino gives you a much cleaner IDE in some respects, and access to a 
large community of developers doing similar stuff. With this one you're 
pretty much on your own (I'll answer questions though).

* The CV I/O on this board is 12-bit, with per-channel update rates 
easily in excess of 50kHz. Not sure what you get with Arduino.

* This is a 40 MHz / 16-bit processor. I'm not an expert on AVR, but I 
believe they're slower & have a smaller wordsize.

* This has DSP capability (it's not an old-style vanilla PIC), so you 
can do some cool stuff (filters, etc) with decent performance. Also, 
this means that the assembly language is a heckuva lot easier to deal 
with and the object code you get from the C compiler is a lot more 
efficient.

* This processor/board has an I2S data port for outboard high-quality 
audio codecs if you're so inclined.

Eric

Jason Proctor wrote:
> well, damn. what's the point in me doing an Arduino module if *this* is 
> available? :-S :-)
> 
> someone should start selling boards.
> 
>> Hahaha ... lol ... this is pretty cool ... The last time it was when I 
>> played the Yamaha CS-80 ... some improvisations.
>> This looks really cool. Nice colors .:)  What is Matrixsynth site 
>> anyway ? I wonder ?
>>
>> Csaba
>> On Jan 15, 2009, at 5:00 PM, Eric Brombaugh wrote:
>>
>>> Csaba Zvekan wrote:
>>>> I have finished my dsPIC fun board , which can be used for all sorts 
>>>> of SDIY applications.
>>>> http://www.csaba.ch/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=30 
>>>>
>>>> Let the coding fun begin :)
>>>
>>> I see you got picked up by Matrixsynth!
>>>
>>> http://matrixsynth.blogspot.com/2009/01/csaba-diy-and-electronics-dspicfun-2.html 
>>>
>>>
>>> Way to go!
>>>
>>> Eric
>>
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