Hi all,
I received my board 3 days ago and I think it's time to share some information that I gathered during this time. First I want to tell you about the board itself. It is a nice little board with extension capability (although for extending the board you need some sort of special connector, I would prefere an off the shelf type connector for easy access, I'll try to solder some sort of connector to the expansion edge in the comming days for advanced applications). It has and on board SPI EEPROM, LineIn/LineOut connectors, codec, and finally an on board XDS100 emulator. From my point of view it has all the basic elements to serve as a basic development and learning tool.
Within the pachage you also get a mini DVD with a rather old (at least mine was old) version of CCS v4. As I have used CCS v3 version this new Eclipse based IDE seemed at first very confusing to me. I have used and actually am using Eclipse based IDEs, this TI version seemed to me a little bit crowded. Ok, the setup of the CCS seemed to me straight forward. It required at least 1GB Ram and if you are using WinXP as myself also SP2 at minimum. There are 3 basic test projects comming with this CCS version from the DVD and also a general demo project. One is for blinking the on board LED, the other for SPI and the last one for the codec. After the initial evaluation and discovered something in the Wiki pages. It was stated that the whole IDE + eZdsp HW was working with VmWare (PC virtualisation SW) which I use extensively to isolate each dev tool I use. I meat lots of problems in the past because of installing dev tools from different manufacturers. So I found a solution with VmWare. As use from time to time very different processors (TI DSPs, Analog DSPs, ARM7/9/Cortex M3, PIC16/18/24/32, AVR, Z8, 8051, etc...) and dev tools it is very practical to isolate them from each other.So for short I copied one ready made fresh WinXP installations for VmWare and downloaded the latest CCS v4 from TIs web site. After the setup I plugged in the board and it worked perfectly.
I'm using now the latest CCS as the one from the DVD has some problems. At first you cannot load your SW into the SPI EEPROM to let the board run on its own. The hex55.exe tool is somewhat outdated. Whether you have to update your CCS with the latest Compiler package (which I do not prefere as you cannot uninstall the initial one and in the IDE you have to select the new compiler suit for every file you create as it always chooses the old one) or use the latest CCS. But keep in mind that the example projects for this board are not included in the latest CCS, only the gel file is present.
After having the CCS running I downloaded the CSL (chip support library) which is a driver library for c55xx family of DSPs. After some changes in the project settings I also managed to run CSL tests. There are drivers for all on board blocks plus some general pupose drivers like dat which is a driver for memory to memory transfer except the pure DMA driver (DAT handles DMA automatically). One thing to keep in mind that DSP/BIOS v6 does not support C55xx, you have to choose v5.
So after having mastered the IDE and able to run the example code I will go on to develop some DSP projects. At first I will try Göetzel for DTMF detection, and than some sort of text2speach and who know what next. I'll keep posting here the progress I made during my eZdsp Roadtest journey.
Ok I'll stop now. I know the information above is somewhat criptic, I was never good at explaining things with style but hope I was able to at least give some usefull information.
Take care and best regards,
Murat YILDIZ
