True Audio

Well I have a very experimental TrueAudio decoder in dsPic assembler that according to the simulator will run at about x4 real time at 40MIPS -- that doesn't include disk/CD I/O but it certainly leaves a fair bit of space for that to happen. On the whole I have been pretty pleased with the dsPic as a processor. If it really does fly the way it seems like it should then we should get some good results. I have also done some more work on a couple of the Codecs that I have re-written the decoder in C++. The Shorten, ALAC and WavPack ones now seem to work for the fairly trivial collection of files that I have thrown at them. It is nice to have some fairly clean implementations of the decoders and it is also nice to work in a somewhat abstract, object oriented view then flip that into the tiny embedded world.

It's Just a Jump to the Left!

Well it didn't end up flying but we are off again. I am again using the excuse of a competition to get this flying and basically the outcome is not really any different. This time we are aiming at using the Microchip dsPic33 to achive the goods. This time we are much more likely to work as we now have a proper DSP, we have a LOT more pins to do stuff and we also have a dedicated DMA engine built into the device. These were things that really stiffiled us last time. The downsides are that the compilers are less developed and the processor is a lot slower. So how is it going? Well we have started collecting togther all the bits and we have the DSP, a USB co-processor, a network interface, a simple graphics display. I am still waiting for the output codec and this time I am also looking for an optical output, this is adding some fun to it all... I am also going to make a PCB up front for this one rather than using a pre-rolled one which often causes more problems than it solves... As far as the PCB/Schematic is going we are getting there fairly quickly so I will keep you posted in the short term...