I have yet to start messing with PICs, mainly because I saw some programmer prices that were a bit scary for a budget conscious (read, poor) college student. Am I looking in the wrong places? Nextg question is a little harder. I'd like to get my hands on a basic DSP for video apps on the cheap. I've just finished an image processing course, and I'm looking to use it to 'reformat' an VGA signal into a digital one. What I really need it to do is to be able to resize the image while maintaining quality, and resample the colors. The idea I've been tnkering with for some time is to get some flash convertes to feed the RGB data to the DSP. The PIC handles marking off the frames for the DSP, oyther housekeeping, and specifying the accepted input modes through the serial data like VGA monitors use. I would like to then drive an LVDS bus so I can try and get a laptop LCD to work with a standard VGA output. If it's cheap, there is a new alternative to expensive controller cards.
as a PIC g'aid it pains me to say that they ain't much good at complicated DSP (anything about 16bit audio). Most places offer a student discount if you email them nicely, so try doing that, but i don't think your going to get any nice deveoplement boards etc. for under $100. You could sample the components from maxim, dallis etc, they all have some very nice video DSP micro's, but if your new to the micro world messing around with a z80 might be a good idea.
I'm aware that using a PIC as a DSP is a bad idea I have two projects currently in mind. The first is to create a cable modem watchdog since Comcast seems to like doing somthing that causes the cable modem to randomly lock up. The current system my borther and I have employed is a piece of software to ping external addresses. If no reply is detectied successivly, then a string of zeros is writeen to the serial port and is used to trigger a timer that cuts power to the cable modem and broadband router. I thought a PIC would be more elegent. If it can't ping outright, at least it could be told to reset the modem remotly through the ethernet connection that's already there. The other project I had in mind is messing with VGA signals. I thought I'd use some flash converters to digitize the analog RGB data to pass on to the DSP for processing. I'd use a PIC to handle the digital sync data and report availabl video modes through the PnP interface, as well as some other small tasks to help the DSP. The provblem is DSP development kits are extremly expensive, so I had hoped somone knew of a basic, cheap dev kit here.
This might be a dumb question, but why not just use a graphics card with a DVI output as well as a VGA? The DVI signals would already be digital.
The problem is that I'm not looking to get a strait digital signal, rather convert its format outside of what a normal video card is expected to produce. DVI has a lot of extra encoding and such as well that requires extra electronics as well to mess with as well. I already have matlab script files I've written to do things like modify the color depth of an image, resize an image, rotate the image, ect. These are things I'd like to do with a DSP, then have the system run a display itself.
well there is the dsPIC design comp, the kits for that are only £75 thats a hudge saving, but only until the 24th of this month so hurry! www.microchip.com for that, i've not looked at one properly yet, so i can't really say if its going to be what you need.
