Get started with real-time DSP programming on hardware

[JimmyAndreson]

I've never worked on real-time DSP (always worked on algorithm development on Matlab). I am looking to take out time during weekdays and weekends to programming DSPs so that I could get an Audio DSP job which requires some experience with DSP implementation of floating/fixed point processors.

Looking online, I suppose my options could be:

Buying a development board/kit and figuring out how to work it

Working with hardware simulation tools

With (1), I did try that out but I found it extremely difficult to setup the hardware and get it talking to the development environment software (it was difficult to go beyond that and actually get to the DSP part for me, in the limited time I had.)

However, I would not be averse to giving it another go, but would really like a good tutorial to start things with.

Do you guys have any other ideas about how I should go about this?

THANKS!!!

[BertKoor]

Chances are near 100% that whatever pick as a learning environment now is different from the platform used by whatever company that's willing to hire you. I don't know how big the job market is in DSP, but I'm sure it's a tiny fraction of generic software developers.

DSP is a pretty broad subject. What type of signals would you like to process, what type of processing? Your answer to this question will give better recommendations.

[antto]

the easiest path to "realtime DSP" on hardware should be probably sorted like this:
1) make an audio program for one of those SBCs (single-board computers) running linux
2) bare-metal code on some ARM (cortex-M) chip, preferably with an FPU (M4F, M7F, etc..) on a board with audio codecs and all the other needed things
3) fish

with #1 you're basically writing a linux program, some of these SBCs have audio inputs/outputs.. whether that's good enough - you have to decide
with #2 you might be able to pick an existing developement board that has been designed for that kind of purpose, to skip the process of making one yourself

in my case, i went for option #2 and i made my own board (and now i'm stuck with audio codec stuff)

now there is also the more serious "DSP" with actual specialized "DSP" processors, but that's way beyond my knowlage as a hobbyist

no idea about matlab, but with arm cortex-m and gcc, you can use C++