I thought I'd give everyone an update on what is happening on the hardware front. I've had a SWAMP05 put together for a couple weeks. Unfortunately it had some major software issues, most of the peripherals were turned off such as USB, S/PDIF, serial port etc. Then when CSOS R2 was released these started working.
So now I have SWAMP05 working essentially the same as the wand carrier board, I can play music over a USB DAC etc. It is now ready for the driver development to proceed. Custom drivers are needed to output data to the DAC chip, control the clock generation, configure the CPU for external clock synching etc. The software guys are spending their time on CSOS right now, so it might be a little while before this gets started. I have also built two other boards, one a test of the new DAC chip and the new ultra low noise regulator chip. Those regulator chips have been a major nightmare. They are in a very small QFN package which is exceedingly difficult to hand solder. I finally worked out a technique to solder them, and found they didn't work. after a couple days I finally tracked this down to me misinterpreting the data sheet, and wound up getting the pinout upside down and backwards. I spent two days trying to perform microsurgery on a board with an X-acto knife, super fine wire, a fine tip soldering iron and the most important part, a binocular microscope. After hours of work I managed to get one regulator hooked up correctly, and low and behold it actually works! When I first put the test board together and realized the regulators weren't working, I took them off one board and put in a good old regulator I had on hand, it's not nearly as low noise as this new one, but it has much bigger pins so I could easily solder it into place. I connected this test board up to the I2S signal from another USB DAC board and got music out of the DAC chip right off the bat. After a couple days burnin the sound was amazing, simply stunning, the best DAC I have at home right now. This thing was blowing away all my twenty times more expensive DACs. I thought this was going to be VERY good DAC, much better than what was in the Touch, but I had no idea it was going to be this stunning. And that isn't even with the ultra low noise regulator. For a PS I was just using the Logitech supplied Touch PS. And it still sounds amazing. I'm working on another board, which is used to program the DSP on the DAC chip so I can try different filters. The board house lost this board and had to re-fab it, so it's going to be a few more days before that is up and running. I'm starting to work on the CSP1 schematic now that I know that at least the basic compute part of the design works. I won't finalize this until we know that we can have working drivers for the audio part. So to summarize, there has been some progress on the hardware side, but there is still a lot of work to do, so try and be patient, this will eventually get done, and I hope it's worth the wait. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
