LeafLabs Garden » Topic: Maple middle ground

LeafLabs Garden » Topic: Maple middle ground http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044 A place to share, learn, and grow... en-US Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:12:59 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://forums.leaflabs.com/search.php pyrohaz on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104778 Sun, 13 Oct 2013 10:03:43 +0000 pyrohaz 104778@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ Yeh i've seen that platform too, it seems a cool idea though I think porting the x86 instruction set for arduino style seems a bit of a chore! I think that gbulmer is right that it would run a form of linux too. In industry and such, how do companies that design audio electronic products generally do it? Do they write the synthesizer OS in pure bare metal code or would they be likely to us a linux system/rtos? gbulmer on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104771 Sat, 12 Oct 2013 12:14:06 +0000 gbulmer 104771@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ The details are a bit sketchy, but Intel have said that the Arduino Galileo is running a 'small Linux'. So it may suffer jitter even if the program looks like an Arduino program. Also, AFAIK, it isn't available yet, and we don't know the price. Adam on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104763 Fri, 11 Oct 2013 14:10:27 +0000 Adam 104763@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ pyrohaz, Looks like the new Arduino-compatible Galileo might do what you want- it's a 400Mhz Pentium SOC that runs Arduino software: <a href="http://arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelGalileo" rel="nofollow">http://arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelGalileo</a> pyrohaz on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104761 Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:23:22 +0000 pyrohaz 104761@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ Hey, I haven't managed to get my head around linux based microcontroller programming. I've managed to do the simple bash control of IO and compile a C file but it just isnt as easy as for example the STM32 series of controllers to control things direct like timers etc. Since i've learnt programming on a microcontroller from scratch and have never really programmed on a real computer, I find the thought of changing style a bit daunting (i've done a bit of matlab but that is hardly C!). Adam - I saw that series of board on my search for getting into that style of progamming, quite like the Olimex iMX233, unfortunately, I just don't have the skill set as of yet to embark on a project like that from scratch! Well i'm just really planning a synthesizer project (as per usual lol) but when it gets down to adding serious effects, processor power becomes a bit of a must, on my stm32f4, implementing a simple tanh distortion consume around 5us alone. Obviously, you can cut time a bit with things like a 3 term series expansion but I was ideally looking for a processor where I don't particularly need to be looking at making seriously efficient code 24/7, obviously I want to keep to good coding practises etc without having to make comprimises. I'm also in need of learning about oversampling, my current understanding is that you execute the same block of code at ax times the sample rate you're trying to achieve, surely if you're oversampling a section of code meaning to be sampled at 48kHz, at 4x, you're looking for that piece of code to be running at 192kHz, surely even 4x oversampling is pretty processor intensive? I have some non-realtime applications for my beaglebone at the moment so i'm not really up for anything risky until I know I can reverse it! Thank you for the tips though. When it comes to JTAG, I assume this is a general specification so will my STLinkV2 work with all JTAG devices or is it generally manufacturer specific? I've looked towards RTOS but I really don't know where to even start! Is there anything that you could give me to look at/read as to get a simple LED flashing for example? I saw the parallella board on HackADay a couple of weeks back, I love the look of it and the idea of all the multiple cores, delegating a task to each core would make the multiple tasks in a synthesizer really efficient. If there is any reads you can give me on using RTOS's, i'd really appreciate it! gbulmer on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104756 Fri, 11 Oct 2013 02:37:12 +0000 gbulmer 104756@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ pyrohaz - Would you please tell us what it is you want to do? Then we might be able to help more effectively. In theory, and depending on the board, you might be able to run the Beaglebone as a 'real-time' microcontroller, without Linux. However, there is likely a lot of work. You'd need some way to load programs, so you'd need a JTAG adapter, and software like Open On-Chip debugger to drive it: <a href="http://openocd.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://openocd.sourceforge.net/</a> I think the Beaglebone Black lost JTAG, but AFAIK the Beaglebone has it: <a href="http://beagleboard.org/static/Docs/ccs-jtag-simple.htm" rel="nofollow">http://beagleboard.org/static/Docs/ccs-jtag-simple.htm</a> You'd need a cross-development tool. Maple's gcc might do the trick, or ARM's launchpad gcc You'd need some libraries to drive the on-chip peripheral interfaces, It might be feasible to extract those from the Linux source, though they may be more complex than you need. So, trawl around for something withstand-alone (none-eabi) libraries To do any of this, you'll likely have to overwrite the existing bootloader, so you might find it hard to go back to the original firmware. This is all theoretical. So I have no real sense about how much work it will require. You might be able to 'brick' the board if you don't understand the details well enough. It shouldn't be any harder than bringing up any raw MCU, and there may be some foks already working on one of the higher-performance Cortex-R or Cortex-M MCU's/SoCs. An alterative approach is to look at the Open Source Real-Time OS sites (there are a bunch of them), and look for the highest performance board they support. They must have a solution to compiling, loading programs, using the toolchain, etc. to get the RTOS to work on the bare metal. They should also have start-up code and some libraries. I'd start at FreeRTOS <a href="http://www.freertos.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.freertos.org/</a> though there are plenty of others. You're looking for a well documented way to compile, link and run code on 'bare metal', and peripheral libraries for the chip. In the medium term (over the next year, or so) a good bet might be Parallella: <a href="http://www.parallella.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.parallella.org/</a> It has a pair of ARM Cortex-M8 running at 800MHz, and a 16-core array processor. I've seen benchmark graphs for the dual A8's (inside the Xilinx FPGA), comparing the real-time performance (jitter) for one core running Linux, against the other running a Real-Time OS. So I believe some work has been done by Xilinx or a partner. Adam on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104752 Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:41:52 +0000 Adam 104752@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ Adam on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104751 Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:41:52 +0000 Adam 104751@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ pyrohaz, I too would like such a thing - a 400MHz Arduino, for instance. I haven't seen anything like that. The best I can think of would be to port Arduino to SAM9XGxx series chips - they run at 400Mhz. Right now they only run Linux, and it would be quite some work to port drivers, but it's possible. The Arduino system and Linux share the same GPL license. Here are a couple of potential boards: <a href="http://www.acmesystems.it/aria" rel="nofollow">http://www.acmesystems.it/aria</a> <a href="http://www.samicc.com/2011/0801/mbc-sam9g25.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.samicc.com/2011/0801/mbc-sam9g25.html</a> pyrohaz on "Maple middle ground" http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=74044#post-104750 Thu, 10 Oct 2013 17:41:11 +0000 pyrohaz 104750@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ Hey guys, This is probably gonna sound like a bit of a weird question but I've got an arduino, maple, an stm32f4 discovery and a beaglebone. Obviously out of all of these processor-wise, the beaglebone is the best with its 1Ghz TI ARM processor though its not the best for real time applications (I haven't managed to find a tutorial on using the PRU as of yet). While the maple and stm32f4 are both slower than the beaglebone, they both have brilliant capabilities. All i'm wondering here is: Is there a middle ground between the stm32f4 (168MHz) and the beaglebone (1GHz) that can be programmed like a micro controller instead of running a fully blown linux style system? Cheers!