DSP recomendation

You should look how to get the thousands of dollars first. If you are not worth thousand of dollars, you obviously not capable of developing a portable audio device.

VLV

Don't be discouraged by some folks' negative remarks.

If you first need to learn how to work with DSPs, then where you lack financial resources you will have to compensate with intelligence, careful research, and prudence. You will still need at least several hundred dollars to buy a typical evaluation kit, possibly nearing and exceeding $1000 to get some additional support items if needed like some cheap electronic test equipment (check into the use of PC sound cards though for spectrum analysis, etc.)

Start researching the DSP product offerings, evaluation kits, tools, 3rd party tools, and developer communities surrounding TI and Analog Devices DSPs. Get onto comp.arch.dsp . Also, look at Danville Signal and other vendors, who might have something to get you started in the sub-$1000 range. Carefully research what is available, and which product both will suit your intended application AND has available free or low cost tools that will allow you to bypass the need to purchase the manufacturer's full-blown development tools. This might force you to have to write assembly language at worst (although for ADI DSPs, might be rather easy-going), or to use gcc/gdb which isn't so bad (but still more painful than I can tolerate, but I can afford at least a few $1000s, even for hobby purposes.)

My DSP interest is in servo control, laser shows, and other fast real-time control stuff, so the TI TMS320F2812 and similar DSPs/tools have afforded me the ability to play with >100MIPS for well less than $1000.

This is different from actually producing a "portable audio product" in which case you need to create something manufacturable and cost effective. Then you will indeed need many $1000s.

Also consider if you can do what you want with something simpler than a DSP, like a cheaper ARM SBC, for ex.

Have fun.

TI's DSP kits start at $99 but Joel wants to built something portable. Many regular DSP eat batteries as if they were popcorn.

What I'm doing doesn't have to be all that complex. It'll be on the orde of complexity of a voice changer. Is there a better digital option tha DSP?

I'm a student so the freer the better.

this might be useful, the docs are terrible

martin

terrible

If you just want mono speech a dsPIC and Si3000 codec should do what you want. dsPIC development software is free.

Leon

You can probably do what you want with an AVR32 (uC3B)