I should perhaps have entitled this post "DSP made easier" as unless you have a brain the size of a planet and perhaps hold a doctorate in mathematics too, DSP is never going to be easy for mere mortals like myself.
Digital Signal Processing is everywhere you look (and listen) and decades have passed since I was forced to look..... FFT may have scarred me for life......
However being something of a masochist it is something I've wanted to understand better, especially using microcontrollers to implement. Flowcode has of course for years supported DSP with guides and examples and that is a great way to learn, but for me it was never too straightforward. Select my dsPIC, mess around with ICSP, purchase the necessary pack and so on, and of course a chip alone is no use by itself, it needs peripherals too. Having at the time no compelling need for DSP it seemed an awful lot of effort, especially as my local pub wasn't on fire.
By the time I decided to do something even the ECIO40p had been discontinued but the desire remained.
Enter SysBlocks from Matrix https://www.matrixtsl.com/sysblocks/
I recently took delivery of this seriously cool bit of kit. I'm sure you will read all about it yourselves but briefly it's a single board containing analogue input/outputs, twin bargraphs (VU meters), knobs, buttons, LEDs and display. It has a couple of E2-Blocks for interconnection with other Matrix boards and a Grove connector too. Powered by a 32-bit PIC it should put the fast in Fourier transforms
I've downloaded the guides and I'm working my way through "Getting Started" and I've found it to be quite intuitive, well so far...... It took no time at all to get a scope and signal generator connected to it and have an ADC / DAC doing their stuff.
- SysBlocks.jpg (59.11 KiB) Viewed 785 times
- ADC-DAC.jpg (77.28 KiB) Viewed 785 times
Having it "all together" makes it quick and easy to experiment with and I now have an excellent reason to spend time in the Evil Lab despite the cold.
Regards