Rockbox Development > New Ports
Rockbox Player - Project to design and build a Free/Open hardware audio player
Llorean:
Just a note: Don't think "for them to port to", think "for us to port to."
If you make your own player, you're probably going to be doing your own work for the porting, too. Ports happen by those who have the player, as we say with any hardware port.
casainho:
--- Quote from: spark on December 29, 2007, 04:15:28 AM ---why not use ARM instead of AVR32?
what was the basis for selecting AVR32 instead of ARM?
--- End quote ---
After talking in IRC a few times with developers of RB, almost everyone think that ARM is the best choice. Because of what you said, because there is already hand optimizations in assembly for ARM, etc...
AVR32 because of that dev board that is "dirty cheap", $73. An equivalent dev board with equivalent ARM should be more than $1000 :(. I think this price is very important to attract or not, developers!
The true is that this AVR32 have also Linux, GCC port, all full documentation, free/open dev tools and an old(transition from AVR 8bits) strong community! However this is new processor.
AVR32 also have DSP instructions, in spite of some old developers of RB said that is not important for RB, others said that is important because can lower cpu energy eat! And thats an important thing at RB! Some developers said that DSP is hard to program... and I would like to have your opinion, since you used a DSP for DSPdap :)
AVR32 ALSO is a DSP but ALSO is a MCU, DSP instructions can or not be used. DSP instructions are used "directly" from GCC, C code.
And as Llorean said, people that own the hardware will made their port!!! So, I think a cheap dev board and free tools are very important!! If cheap, more people can buy and than more developers.
Also scharkalvin, one that wants to develop, is favorable to AVR32, to this dev board.
To resume: IMO, AVR32 have advantages over ARM, because of very low price dev board, is a MCU/DSP and low power. Please read others old messages from this post!
Spark, If you think that an ARM will be better, please find a dev board and put here a comparison, specially the price and the highlights, the advantages over this AVR32 dev board.
Define the dev board, IMO, is very important! After that we can start developing :)
eumesmo:
After development is complete, does a garden variety user need a DEV board in order to build player? As you noticed I'm a total newbie, have you considered scavenging something like the Motorola Motofone F3, for some 30 dollars you get ultra low power screen, keypad, joystick(?), battery, battery controller(?), sturdy frame(slick design), connectors(power, battery, display, keypad), mic, charger, perhaps even other useful items.
Bagder:
--- Quote from: casainho on December 29, 2007, 05:13:04 AM ---AVR32 also have DSP instructions, in spite of some old developers of RB said that is not important for RB, others said that is important because can lower cpu energy eat! And thats an important thing at RB! Some developers said that DSP is hard to program...
--- End quote ---
First, "old developers" are against DSP in general for all the downsides a DSP provides. It is marginally better if the DSP is easily accessible using gcc, but only a little. If you really MUST use the DSP in order to get decent battery life that's even more arguments against the AVR I think since it'll then require your AVR port of rockbox to have DSP-adjustments literally all over the Rockbox internals and not just in the parts where you will optimize the codecs. All those modifications must be done by owners of such AVR-based targets and so far that's just this effort...
The current Rockbox code is fairly highly optimized for coldfire and ARM, and re-making all those for AVR will probably be a significant amount of work.
Also, as a side-note, I'm sure you can find cheaper ARM-devboards than 1000 USD, And you'll buy yourself a foundation that is a LOT less work to get Rockbox to run good on...
This said, I'll enjoy getting another architecture that Rockbox will run on!
scharkalvin:
--- Quote ---Also scharkalvin, one that wants to develop, is favorable to AVR32, to this dev board.
--- End quote ---
I have NOTHING against the Arm processors. The Avr32 development board that is made by Atmel seemed to have most of everything needed for a GP development platform and it is dirt cheap (as these things go). If it wasn't being used to develop a DMP device the board would make a dandy Linux network server, router, etc.
We are now using lots of small Arm cpu's in new products where I work, so I expect to get some first hand experience using them. Most of these parts (2132, etc) are a bit on the slow side for good use with decoders (probably want at least a 50mhz part and what we are using tops out at about 25 I think).
I've seen some cheap (< $150) Arm development boards on Fleabay but they seemed lacking in what was needed, though they did come with nice i/o (small color lcd, etc).
Please keep beating the bushes for better ideas folks! Just keep in mind we want something with a good life cycle (just hate it when someone discontinues the part you are using!). At least Atmel has a good history in this regard. They have discontinued very few good parts, and have had close sub's for those that they did.
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