The OMAP is not a great platform to use for the volumes of units that might
make it into the ham world. I don't think the integrated DSP is needed
when you have several hundred mhz arm and fpu anyways. At least from what
I see and what I've been working on the idea is to come up with something
that might be MIC sized or at least a small box, possibly battery powered.
For that to happen I would suggest a small MCU with good DSP lib and FPU.
I've focused on the STM32F4 so far because it seems to fit the bill nicely.
If you really want to use a full blown linux system I don't think you'll
find anything out there better than the TI supported OMAP and sitara
boards. The new beaglebone black is expensive, powerful and you likely
won't need a dedicated DSP onboard to several codec2 streams. With that
being said I still come back to those of us that want a module or something
that is purpose built like codec2 on the STM32F4.
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 1:14 PM, David Witten <[email protected]> wrote:
> Kristoff,
>
> It seems to me that the OMAP series chips with Floating Point (C6/C7) DSPs
> would be ideal for HAM purposes, but:...
>
> 1. To the best of my knowledge, you *must* use TI's CCS development tools
> to access the DSP functionality, and follow fairly complex rules for
> coordinating data transfer and resource management between the DSP and
> CPU('s). Though some of these tools are based on GNU gcc/g++, some (and
> especially library code) are not. This seems to take a coder out of the
> Open Source world pretty quickly.
>
> 2. Talking to TI support people for another project seems to indicate
> that all of the OMAP products (except perhaps the OMAP-L137/138) are
> considered 'High Volume Customer' products, and support is only provided to
> customers purchasing $1M+ volumes. The following is from a note I sent to
> a client some time back:
>
> "As I have feared, TI's future plans continue to de-emphasize their
> ARM+DSP products. Monday I attempted to speak with their telephone
> support and was told that most of the OMAP processors are no longer
> considered general market products and are only supported for 'very
> large volume customers', meaning ones who purchase in multiple 100K+
> volumes. They were very nice about it. They just did not have
> support personnel who were up to date on these products."
>
> "It seems that the number of customers who have need of DSP
> functionality beyond that bundled in the pre-programmed floating
> point, video acceleration, audio and video decoding, etc. is
> vanishingly small. And with the processing power of the multiple
> general-purpose cores in these chips, specialized programmable DSP
> functionality no longer rates a core of its own."
>
> "I have seen a steady decrease in the information available on the DSP
> portion of these platforms with each successive family. With the OMAP
> 55XX series it is scarcely mentioned at all."
>
> "The one exception to this is the OMAP-L137/138 Integra DSP+ARM
> packages. They are supported, and supposedly will continue to be.
> Up to date, relevant (audio processing) examples are available. See:
>
> http://www.ti.com/product/omap-l138
>
> I believe that the OMAP-L138 has a tightly coupled C674x DSP running
> at 456 MHz coupled to an ARM-9 CPU, Also running at 456MHz. Much like
> the OMAP 3530 in the Beagle XM. This would seem to be more than
> powerful enough for your purposes."
>
> "A development system for this chip is shown here:
>
> http://www.mitydsp.com/products-services/cpu-engines/mitydsp-l138/";
>
> This may or may not be correct, but it is my impression
>
> The tools are there, and so is the documentation. But expect a really
> tough go tracking them all down and keeping them up to date.
>
> The situation is similar or possibly worse with other vendors of this
> class of products. I have stuff for Samsung, Marvell, Freescale, etc. If
> you are not Apple, you can buy them, but don't ask any dumb questions.
>
> Dave Witten, KD0EAG
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 6
>> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:22:10 +0200
>> From: Kristoff Bonne <[email protected]>
>> Subject: Re: [Freetel-codec2] Codec2 for uC or DSP
>> To: [email protected]
>> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>
>> Bruce,
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 23-04-13 22:05, Bruce Perens wrote:
>> > On 4/23/2013 12:54 PM, Curt, WE7U wrote:
>> >> On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Kristoff Bonne wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Now there's a BeagleBone for $45 too. I haven't looked at the specs
>> to see whether it has floating point, but maybe another possibility?
>> >>
>> >> 1GHz Cortex-A8, 2GB on-board flash, microSD, microHDMI, ethernet, $45:
>> >>
>> >> http://goo.gl/SsqE6
>> > It's a Sitara, related to the one in our AM335x starter kit which we'll
>> > be showing at Dayton, except that the starter kit has a touchscreen,
>> > bluetooth, and wifi. I think the BeagleBone Black has 4 processors on
>> > chip: a Cortex A8 (which I think does have floating point), C7 DSP (OK
>> > if you want to invest the time), two PRUs. A PRU is very simple scalar
>> > in-order 32 bit processor with 4K program RAM and the ability to access
>> > all of the on-chip peripherals and to share a pair of mailbox registers
>> > and some RAM with the main processor. It does the real-time and
>> > sleep-mode jobs more efficiently than the main processor.
>> This kind-of makes me think of TI's OMAP soc devices that have one (or
>> more) cortex-A CPUs + an additional cortex-M for "slow stuff".
>>
>>
>> Just wondering, will it actually be able to access these additional
>> processors?
>>
>> I have a pandaboard which is OMAP4430 based. That chip also has an
>> additional DSP core and a GPU.
>>
>> However, I never really found a good document that describes how to
>> actually use the. I read that the DSP core had to be addresses via some
>> special API, that was about it.
>>
>>
>> So, will we be able to use these additional cores?
>> I would be interested to know how coding this kind of enviroment really
>> is done.
>>
>>
>> 73
>> Kristoff - ON1ARF
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
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