[music-dsp] okay, so i got my STM32F4-Discovery board in the mail today.

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Apr 12, 2012, at 9:29 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> well, i just figgered out that this thing has a D/A only.  no A/D.  so no "passing" audio.

Correct. The STM32 MCU has a pretty decent 12-bit multi-channel ADC, as well as a 2-chl 12-bit DAC, so if you use those you could do some lower-resolution audio. No audio input codec though. I am looking a building a little codec board that would plug in to the expansion connector and override the on-chip audio DAC. Let me know if there is any interest.

> i guess i can try to do some simple synthesis with it (like wavetable), but no MIDI connector.  if there is a traditional serial connection (what we used to call a UART in the olden days), then maybe something MIDI can be attached.

Plenty of UARTs in the MCU. Adding a MIDI input isolator would be pretty simple. That might be an option on the codec board.

>> Atollic Truestudio is your basic Eclipse + GCC package which they charge for the full version. A size limited free demo is available. I've installed it and it seems to work fine.
> 
> does this mean that both the Eclipse IDE and ARM GCC apps are in this package? i don't have to run down one or the other?  and they run in Windoze XP (not Fedora or Umbutu)?

Yep. Just don't try to compile anything larger than 32kB.

>> For a completely free unbundled Eclipse + GCC, check out YAGARTO. Installing this can be a bit of a chore, especially getting the debugger drivers talking to the Discovery board - what's your time worth?
> 
> i dunno.  i think not very much, as of late.
> 
> is YAGARTO micro$hit XP compatible or is it linux?  i can't do linux with my PC.

YAGARTO runs under MS Windows.

> too bad nobody does this for a Mac.  nice USB connectors on my Mac, too.

There are builds of ARM GCC that work on the Mac. It's entirely possible to edit/compile on a Mac, but downloading to flash and realtime debug are still iffy.

Eric