[LAD] FOSS Ethernet Soundcard - IETF Ethernet AVB

[errordeveloper at gmail.com]

Hi everybody,

Fallowing up the long discussion i'm trying to sort of give the
information you all seem to be missing.

there was a meantion of this, but not too many of you have paid any
attention:

here you can find an article about the current status of the protocol mess:                                                                                                                            
http://prosoundnewseurope.com/pdf/PSNLive/PSNLive_2009.pdf (page 28) 

obviously eas50 is good to go, but Ethernet AVB is right thing really.
the only thing that it's still work in progress, but many of the
proprietary vendors, which already have their own networking solution
(like Harman with HiQ-net, the one i can name of top of my head)
are involved in AVB stadard deveelopment.

The idea of AVB is to bypass the IP layer, which is right thing really.
you don't need to assign IPs to your audio nodes, really!
in avb you'd just have to select channels that nodes whant to listen to.

there is a fair bit of documentation on the ietf.org AVB group's page.

but XMOS is looking to be the best point of refference:

http://www.xmos.com/news/15-jun-2009/xmos-simplifies-ethernet-avb-implementation

is think we should forget everything else and crack on with the XS1 AVB
implementation!

their XS1 chips seem to be really great,
their are basically every innovative and open-source minded.
the official toolchain is LLVM-GCC based.

you can use C, C++ or their own XC.
XC is basically C with some stuff omited (like goto and floats)
and XMOS IO stuff added, don't just say WTF, look at it first!

you should also watch the videos here:

http://www.xmoslinkers.org/conference-online-wf

especialy the two about the "XMOS Architecture" and the AVB
presentation.

some  dev-kits are quite expencive, but that's due to low-volume really
;)

there is alos a nice USB Audio kit!
plus there is alittle board that is cheap and has two RJ45's on it
already :)

I'm myself studying the XC book at the moment. And geting familiar with
the tool set :)~~

looks very exciting, cause these are the invovative chips!
ok, may be an FPU is really missing on XCore, but how many DSPs have
it anyway? well quite a few, but there was no FPU on dsps for ages! :))

also XC or C/C++ are so much more obvious then the bloody "menthal american military engeneers non-sense" called HDL-whatever!


Cheers Everyone,
Hope you will appreciate my excitment :)~ (l0l)
-- 
ilya .d