I want to start a little home audio project. I effectively want to
reproduce (simulate?) some guitar effects boxes I use. I'm not really
interested in any open-source filter/effects software, because one main
goal is to design and code that stuff myself (my graduate work was in
digital signal processing). My biggest issue is figuring out the
hardware to support the basic goal: An open source RTOS controlling
platform and farming the actual processing to some kind of DSP-ish
hardware. In researching this, I ended up at BeagleBoard.The first thing I want is some kind of open source OS that supports the
primary controlling system. I want to develop, test and have some kind
graphical/plotting tool on a desktop box, so I'd abstract the physical
controlling interface in a way that I could manage it from external
software rather than physical hardware (knobs, switches, etc). I'm also
not too concerned with A/D conversion in real-time; in a first pass, I
would be very happy to abstract the digital input/output interface and
handle that externally too. I have (or had) a lot of experience w/
VxWorks (on PowerPc) and ThreadX on ARM, but I’m thinking I shouldn’t
expect to find open source equivalents of their respective development
environments. I ‘m actually thinking that the main requirement here is
going to be based on the second thing.The second thing I would like to do is push the effects processing to some
kind of DSP hardware. I can imagine some scenarios, but this is where I am
really out of my depth. I have some superficial experience with DSP
interaction, but the low-level details where hidden behind various APIs.
So, I'm really hunting in the dark here because this seems like the really
hard thing to do from scratch. How do I go about figuring out whether I
can even put together the hardware so that I *could* communicate with say
a Motorola or Texas Instruments DSP from the RTOS? I'd love to find a
setup where I could (or had to) write my own device drivers, but honestly I
don't know if my understanding of Linux device drivers even translates to
the DSP world. Do you flash code to the DSP? Would I have to write it in
assembly? Assuming I can get the hardware cheaply, am I even going to be
able to find open source environments to support communicating with it?
I think you should explore these possibilities of using gstreamer and
gstreamer API's to achieve this.