[sdiy] hobbyist hardware DSP - choosing a platform

[n.pipenbrinck at hilbert-space.de]

> The BeagleBone Black is TI, but strangely enough it is not based on Texas
> Instruments' OMAP chips, which combine ARM and TMS320C6000 DSP. TI have
> $49 ezDSP boards with DSP and audio jacks, but I'm surprised that TI
> doesn't have a BeagleBone color with DSP - am I missing something?

The BeagleBone are lower cost and use the Stellaris chips which indeed
don't have the DSP part. The chip itself is close to the Omap3 though.

There is still the BeagleBoard (Omap3) and the PandaBoard (Omap4). They
are a bit aged these days but still very powerfull.

The Omap4 DSP subsystem is insane. Not only you get the TMS320C64+ DSP but
also three (as far as I remember) ARM-cores running at full clock speed
tightly coupled to the DSP. They don't have much memory but they are great
for all kinds of additional housekeeping and DMA sequencing.

Thanks to good DMA integration the little ARM cores can also do signal
processing independent of the DSP. I got a 31 band stereo EQ running on
one of the weaker ARM9 cores a few years back. Didn't had any better use
for the little core and hated to see it do nothing. :-)

Oh, and then there is the main Cortex-A9 core which usually runs linux and
does all the networking/usb/user interface stuff side by side to the DSP
crunching numbers.

The downside of this complexity is, that it's hard to get started. Expect
a few frustrating weeks before you even get a hello world running on the
DSP.

Best,
  Nils