[sdiy] dsPIC-based virtual analog

[Eric Brombaugh]

On 01/27/2010 11:12 AM, Rainer Buchty wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jan 2010, Eric Brombaugh wrote:
>
>> The Eval/Student version of the Microchip C compiler for the dsPIC is
>> free.
>
> There's also a GCC port for the dsPIC; however, you still require the
> free Microchip version for grabbing the header files and libraries.
>
> -> http://www.baycom.org/~tom/dspic/

Thanks for pointing that out - has anyone actually used this?

Tom Sailer is a pretty important guy in the Linux audio community - did 
a lot of the sound card drivers back in the day. He's pretty good at DSP 
too and I was glad to see this when he originally posted it back in 
2005/2006 time frame. Unfortunately, these RPMs haven't been updated 
since then and Fedora is about 8 major revisions past the version that 
these were targeted at. GCC has moved well past the version that this is 
based on also. Add to that the fact that the downloader 'dspicprg' has 
also gone about 5 years without updates, there's no support for debug 
and you've got a pretty lame development environment.

There is a slightly newer version of the dsPIC GCC available for Debian 
here:

http://old.nabble.com/Debian-templates-for-dsPIC-build-toolchain-3.01-td12265748.html

but again, this toolchain is about 2.5 years old and is targeted at a 
version of Debian that's no longer current so it's difficult to get it 
to build.

I'm a pretty big Linux fan - been using it since 1994 or so and it's my 
main desktop. I'd love to be able to use it to develop dsPIC code but 
I'm not willing to take the time to become the kind of GCC maintainer 
necessary to keep my toolchain current. Microchip gives away very usable 
WinXX tools and pragmatically, I'd rather spend my time on the firmware 
development.

Eric