Schweet! The DSP board came in!

Hey ya'll. Our DSP dev kit came in recently. As you can see from the picture, it's from Freescale semi'. It's called the "Symphony SoundBite" and it basically is a DSP platform designed for audio signal processing. It features the DSP56371, a codec, and some GPIO pins. Another cool feature is the built-in debugger with a USB interface.

We've already whipped up some code, based on some example stuff from Freescale, that passes-through a signal directly from the inputs to the outputs. Unfortunately for us, the GNU C compiler that targets this DSP is crap. The IDE, which is based on Eclipse, is nice, but also still very immature. From what I've seen on the Freescale forums, they don't seem to be supporting this board as much (GCC 1.37.1 anyone?) as their more expensive offerings, which is kind of understandable considering the board's target audience: hobbyists and cash-strapped university students. There's another tool chain, Altium TASKING for DSP53xxx, that provides nice DSP intrinsics for maximizing the special features of the chip, and a mature optimizing C compiler, but the 15-day trial and it's $500 price tag is much too prohibitive. Therefore, for us to get performance out of the chip, it looks like we'll be coding the computationally intensive stuff in ASM. On the upside, learning how to program this thing at the machine code level will definitely be a fulfilling experience because we'll be exposed to inherent architectural differences a DSP has between a regular general-purpose CPU. Besides, no one said the project was gonna be easy.

Aside from our previous little pet-peeve, we think this platform is a great enabler for what we plan to do, and it'll definitely provide us with some valuable real-world experience.

As for the front-end, Andy ordered some 40-pin DIP micro-controller samples from Microchip, as well as a programmer/debugger. We already came up with the command protocol for the application layer of the serial I/O. The preliminary command set can be found on our wiki.

We think we're off to a pretty good start. After speaking with Professor Jenks about our project, we now have to start making progress with our spec document. Anyway, we look forward to a very fun year and hopefully we'll be able to show something interesting for demo day!