How to Program a Low Cost Sinusoidal Generator on the TMS320 Platform
Alex Boudreau of SoftDB and Bruno Paillard of D-Box Technologies have submitted a new white paper titled "How to Program a Low Cost Sinusoidal Generator on the TMS320 Platform" on www.taylorriver.com. The article discusses the typical method used for programming sinusoidal generators, as well as the disadvatges to these approaches, and then illustrates a new, more effective method for programming sinusoidal generators on the TM2320 platforms.
"A typical task of a DSP system is to generate a sine signal. The traditional sinusoidal generation technique poses various problems when it is implemented on a low-cost, 16-bit fixed point DSP. During the design phase of a DSP application, if precision is required, engineers have a tendency to select a floating point DSP, resulting in a more expensive design.
The following text presents an alternative technique to generate a sinusoidal signal with a high precision, up to the highest frequencies on a low cost fixed point DSP. The implementation of this technique is very simple and uses less DSP resources (memory and CPU time) than the traditional approaches."
Ilko Iliev of Ronetix GmbH has released an application note on developing an Atmel AT45DB DataFlash driver for the eCos operating system. His article takes developers through the process of creating the driver and navigating through the unique features of eCos using the high speed JTAG emulator, PEEDI.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
Every eCos device driver must use two OS-provided macros to “register” itself, so its init function gets called every time the OS boots and its lookup function is called whenever the user application invokes cyg_io_lookup() to get the handler to the device, specifying the device name as an argument.
These two macros are BLOCK_DEVIO_TABLE() and BLOCK_DEVTAB_ENTRY(). The eCos docs about the SPI driver say that we need to make sure a single SPI operation is taking part at that time, so a mutex is what we need to synchronize the ISP access:
Veteran embedded programmer and professional software consultant
from
has contributed an application note for Taylor River's visitors on on writing frequency measurement algorithms for the PIC16F88 processor using the Hi-Tech PICC compiler. As Karl notes in the article, the code he provides for us is portable to virtually any micro you choose to program.
Karl’s article steps developers through a number of efficient algorithms in C for frequency measurement, as well as his choice of tools for the job.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
"[The PIC16F88 contains] a rather daunting feature set for someone new to embedded development and Microchip controllers to master. However, a good C compiler can handle the bank switching and other idiosyncrasies of the part while still allowing the user to configure the many peripheral parts and interrupts on the chip. "
