A bit of advice needed

[ale500]

I have this nice project and I find at least 3 ways of doing it.
What I need:

- TFT controller (480x272x8bpp would do)
- 12 bit ADC 1Msps
- 64kpoint FFT (when calculated in some 200 ms or so even better!)

I can either go with:

AVR32 (or coldfire) + external SRAM + FPGA for ADC and TFT
2 x XS1-L1s with external SRAM.

From the cost (I only need 1 maybe 2 units) it is sort of the same, I have to make boards anyways.
Parts for both ways are there, my question is that I think that 2 XMOS is just a waste of MIPS and using FPGAs is just more complicated. My L1 board has not been tested yet... Any advice would be nice :) (On the partition of the FFT too :)

Thanks,

Ale

[boeserbaer]

I would look at http://www.compulab.co.il/t3530/html/t3 ... asheet.htm
If all of your cost is in the board, you can save a lot by using a COM, and a 2 layer board for the rest of your circuitry. With the 3530, you pretty much have anything you could possible want, LINUX OS, plenty of memory, DSP co-processor...


Mike

[lilltroll]

I would look at http://www.compulab.co.il/t3530/html/t3 ... asheet.htm
If all of your cost is in the board, you can save a lot by using a COM, and a 2 layer board for the rest of your circuitry. With the 3530, you pretty much have anything you could possible want, LINUX OS, plenty of memory, DSP co-processor...


Mike

And what about the JTAG, you can buy XDS100v2 and run it under CCS4.X if it is supported !?, but it will only run the JTAG clock at 1 MHz, to make you really annoyed over how slow things are.
Otherwise you have to pay a lot more for a XDS5xx version of the JTAG.
On the linux side you have a quadrillion of linux distributions, but neither of them work 100% or have support for all the components on the board, or the CCS version and the JTAG version and the RealTime BIOS version is not compatible after TI released RealTime BIOS 5.014534234 and so on.

The support for each module card is "in general" not so long from the general supplier from my experience, and the toolchain is already out of date when you get the kit it and you dont get the fixes that are done to the Linus kernel etc, so in the end you have to find stable GIT releases and succeed to compile different parts together yourself to have a linux that supports you hardware and SW demands ... or does compulab (which I havn't tried my self) provide a better updated toolchain and support.

They make a batch of maybe 4000 modules, and thereafter they move to a never chip, not updating the old ones.

It is indeed a problem when one part supply the chip, another part supply the board and others the software and toolchains.

[ale500]

Those modules sure look nice and feature full. I have a similar module with an AVR32 (AP7000 variant, discontinued). I think I'll go with a XMOS solution as I devised a way of doing the FFT. Now I have to test my idea :)