BillFitzmaurice.info

Has anyone considered the application of these little things in pro sound, maybe as a DSP/EQ/Limiter/Crossover/Mixer Channel?

Interesting....

Though the arduino boards may be more economical...

I saw this little thing the other day in Popular Mechanics. If some guy over on AVS or someplace would be willing to code a program like the MiniDSP's software platforms for limiter/EQ/crossover, etc, the Raspberry Pi would be a competitor for the MiniDSP. I'm not sure how this would work with the lack of physical inputs, though. There's a 3.5mm audio out jack, video RCA jack, and 2 USB ports along with a LAN port, SD card reader as a "hard drive", and HDMI port for video output. If someone could find a way for this all to work with the software and limited ports, I would definitely go for this over a DCX+DEQ, seeing as the Raspberry Pi is less than $30.

There is a section to connect direct IO on the board but you would have to code the interface to it.

I know of someone working on audio playback from a Raspberry PI. He is using USB. Not sure if total latency is acceptable when live audio is passed through the device with input as well as output over USB.

A friend of mine uses one as a home theater playback device. If im correct there are a lot of external devices that can be controlled with it. He is working on making it a domotica controller.
There should be possibilities as a dsp, since it has much more capabilities as a mini DSP.

I messed with one for a while, just too underpowered for playback of HD video. Tried it with XBMC. I'm going to use it now as a picture frame (big low power lcd tv) that will enable me to display pictures and video. As far as theater pcs, I'm just gonna stick with Nvidia ion lower power pcs. Not sure how they would do as minidsp clones but it's an interesting idea

I have one and have used it as a media player at home to watch video files using different OpenElec builds. The early OpenElec builds were not very stable but as of a month ago I was at least able to get through a few shows without *too* many reboots and hassles. Still not a reliable, turn it on and it works media player but fun to play with.

To do what the miniDSP does, a DSP is needed. From what I can find on the interweb, the main IC on the Pi (Broadcom BCM2835 System on a Chip (SoC)) does have a DSP included. However, its functionality hasn't been implemented on the Pi yet and I can't find any official plans to do it. The information around the SoC seems to be quite tightly controlled by the manufacturer. An Analog to Digital converter board for the inputs would also be needed and then a splitter for the HDMI to get the audio out.

This idea would be fun to play with but looks like a case of "hurry up and wait". And then maybe wait some more.

Digging up an old thread.. Why not!

I have a raspberry pi, they're making strides with regards to the software, but there's lots to improve upon to make it a DSP. The USB on the model B is still flaky, but that's only a big issue if USB 1.1 and 2 devices are on the same bus. Not sure if its a hardware issue or not, but it kinda kills the throughput. The onboard sound is poor at best and only outputs, though I've heard the HDMI is just fine.

The exciting thing about the newer revision of the model B is that there's a header for an I2S bus avaliable. There's still no official software support, but it's in the works and that coupled with the DSP in the GPU core may make the pi a useful signal processor in the future.

Neat little devices, unfortunately the closed nature of the Broadcom chip makes things move a bit slow, but they ARE working on making such things avaliable!