A host port interface board to enhance the TMS320C6713 DSK

The fairly recent introduction of the TMS320C6713 DSP Starter Kit (DSK) from Texas Instruments (TI) brought a much more capable, stable, and robust DSP development environment to both university and industry engineers. However, while this new DSK had many improvements over the TMS320C6711 DSK it replaced, it did not include any way to transfer data to and from the host computer except through the debugger interface. Unfortunately, this interface is extremely limited in bandwidth and requires that the TI software tools be available. This means that the existing suite of winDSK6 demonstration tools cannot be run on the 6713 DSK, denying educators a valuable teaching and classroom demonstration resource. Also, there is no way to interface an application on the host PC directly to the DSK, limiting the ability of students to create stand-alone, interactive projects using the DSK. To solve these problems, the authors have created an interface to the TMS320C6713 DSK that uses the Host Port Interface (HPI) to provide both a means for a PC host application to boot software onto the DSK, and to permit the transfer of data between the DSK and the host PC application. A software package makes it possible for students to create stand-alone Windows applications that communicate directly with the DSK. In addition to parallel port communication, the interface provides USB, RS-232, and digital input/output ports as user selectable resources. This paper discusses the specific capabilities of the hardware and software interface, summarizes the software applications and library calls available, and relates a few of our teaching experiences using this new capability. The authors freely distribute the software components of the interface for educational use.