I had some ideas for some audio effects and dusted off an old Analog Devices ADSP-SC589 dev board that’s been sitting idle in a drawer for the last few years. The ADSP-SC589 is a real-time processor with 2 SHARC+ DSP cores and an ARM Cortex-A5 processor. I’ve played with rust a bit, and wanted to try it out for something embedded, and this seemed like a great opportunity. Theres no LLVM backend for the SHARC architecture, so I’m stuck with C/C++ and Analog’s compiler there, but I figured I would write the code that runs on the ARM core and orchestrates the DSPs and peripherals in rust.

I’ve been working on an Audio DSP library for iOS/OSX and have been leveraging a lot of the operations in the Accelerate Framework. In this post I’ll go over some of the background theory behind FIR filters. Then I’ll walk through a basic implementation of a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter. In the next few posts, I will show you how to take advantage of some of the vectorized operations in the Accelerate Framework.