[sdiy] STM32 (or other) audio DSP learning recommendations

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

Hi John,

I’ve had great success with the TMS320. It’s a family of DSP chips that goes back to 1983. They’re much more powerful than a general purpose ARM processor, and can be incredibly efficient for just the sorts of processing you need for audio.

Texas Instruments has the C5535/C5545 eZdsp USB Stick Development Kit with headphone output, mic input, 2GB micro SD, and free USB Audio Class and USB HID firmware sources. Part number is TMDX5535EZDSP at $99. It’s a 16-bit fixed point DSP, and has 40-bit internal accumulators.

There is also the TMDX5502EZDSP at $89. It has audio jacks and converters on the board.

These eZdsp boards have built-in emulators so that you don’t have to buy a separate JTAG programmer. They also make it easy to get started writing DSP code without worrying about an external audio CODEC for input and output.

Texas Instruments used to have a $50 model that was small enough to hang off a USB jack, but I couldn’t find that model in a quick search. Be on the lookout for it. This was also in the C55x family of DSP that you’ll find lots of information about, along with mailing lists and a web forum or two.

Brian Willoughby


On Jun 26, 2018, at 10:08 AM, John Speth <john.speth at andrews-cooper.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi list-
>  
> I’d like to get myself setup and productive in experimenting with audio DSP techniques and I’m looking for recommendations to get started.  My goal is career development (EE and SW eng) that will keep me interested in continuing the project, whatever that may be.  I figured the SDIY crowd can recommend good dev/eval boards with appropriate SW libraries.
>  
> My preference is STM32 based since I know the chip so well but I’m interested in anything that meets these needs:
> 	• Getting started relatively quickly (little to no soldering).
> 	• Excellent SW support (ported libraries, lots of configuration options, high quality code, lots of examples).
> 	• Minimum cost (of course but I don’t want to “cheap out” either).
> 	• Covers signal generation (like a synth) and audio processing (for example, echo/flanging, various filters, vocoder, etc).
>  
> Any recommendations?
>  
> Thanks, John Speth