c'mon guys, lets put our heads together to control a STA310 ac3 decoder

Re: I Have STA310 for sale

brettcoupe said:
Hi Guys
I have a stock of STA310's arriving in a few weeks
I will have approx 20 avail for sale at $15.00 USD each + shipping from Australia if you are interested in them please let me know

Cheers
Brett


Hey Brettcoupe,

Do you have any STA310s still? I'm looking to use a couple in my senior design class. Let me know!
 
Trilithium, your photographs are quite impressive.

For a project, some classmates and I are planning on trying to use the SAT310 to decode (at least) MP3 files.

Can someone here point me to some resources on doing that? If anyone has accomplished this, might you be willing to explain some of the coding?
 
As far as I understand the MP3 decoding part it is using the parallel data bus as the input. So I think you must use a external uC for the data stream from a source. An ATmega644 or something reading the data from a flashcard should be a working scenario.
The STA310 isn't capable of anything auto detect of the input source supplied to the parallel interface, so you have to manually set the decoding algorithm.
 
Bo102010 said:
Trilithium, your photographs are quite impressive.

For a project, some classmates and I are planning on trying to use the SAT310 to decode (at least) MP3 files.

Can someone here point me to some resources on doing that? If anyone has accomplished this, might you be willing to explain some of the coding?


If it is MCU controlled stereo decoding you're looking for, it might be easier to go with a chip like the STA013 or VS1003(which has build in DAC's). The special thing about the STA310 is that it is able to decode AC3 S/P-DIF streams as generated by dvd-players ect.
 
@TriLithium
have you some schematics for the area around the sta310? Things i like to know are the PLL-filters and the clock generation for the chip.

cu Tarzanwiejane


I would like to have the schematics, too. I tried to have a look at the design of this polish magazine. The problem is that I'm not using Protel, so I can't open the schematics.
Does one of you, who actually got pcm streams out of the STA310 chip has something like a "how-to" on which registers to set in the decoder to get results. I guess there must be something like an initialize after power on.
Cheers
Holger
 
@trithium

can you eyplain a little bit this line?

WriteDevice(&H10, &H1, ftStatus) 'Soft Reset

I guess your function WriteDevice just writes commands to the STA310, but what about these values? &H10 means registe at adress 0x10?
&H1 means value ist 0x01? This information would help me a lot.

Then the other question is this:

How did you connect these pins of the device? :confused:

31 CLK
64 CLKOUT
69 PCMCLK
67 SCLK

sorry for all these questions, but I'm still not sure if I did connect these pins right on my design.

Thanks
Cheers
Holger
 
I have the original STA310P eval-board, but so far I wasn't able to get any schematics or software for it. Now I see that you guys have the schematic. Where did you get it from? Does anyone of you also have the GUI-SW for the eval board? Also any more detailed datasheets than the one from the STM HP would be helpful for me. Can anyone help me?

Thanks
Sebastian
 
flybysun said:
@trithium

WriteDevice(&H10, &H1, ftStatus) 'Soft Reset

I guess your function WriteDevice just writes commands to the STA310, but what about these values? &H10 means register at address 0x10?
&H1 means value ist 0x01? This information would help me a lot.

Then the other question is this:

How did you connect these pins of the device? :confused:

31 CLK
64 CLKOUT
69 PCMCLK
67 SCLK


yes, that is the way it works with the registers.


31 CLK is the core clock input, it would like to have a 27Mhz signal on it

64 CLKOUT is one I'm not using anywhere, it is the output of the system pll, no purpose to anyone except for a mcu perhaps??

69 PCMCLK is either a input or a output for the DAC
This pin is somewhat tricky. If there is no need for anything higher than 128fs then you can use this pin as output for the DAC. If you want a higher multiple oversampling then it should be a input at the right audio frequency. 24.576Mhz is one for 24 bit 96Khz 256fs. This is than fed to the STA310 and the DAC.
But the problem arises when you want an other sampling rate. Let's say 16/44.1/128 audio CD. Then you need a much lower frequency. But you can't because you have the 24.576 installed.
PLL can solve this off course, externally is one way. But at a cost and parts. Internally with the audio PLL is another option, but that is not a feature I have figured out yet.
If you want to play on the save side you should use the internal S/Pdif pll and settle for 128fs.

67 SCLK is a the SCK pint for the DAC, it is divided by the PCMDIVIDER (0x54) register in the STA310

Hope this helps, don't hesitate to ask if not.
 
Thank you for your help,

ok, that means I had some missunderstandings in the datasheet. The problem was that at the time I was drawing the schematic and the pcb I didn't have the ST Eval-board schematic. So, now I have the PCB with some failures in the CLK connections. I corrected them, but it still didn't work. I didn't have time this weekend, but tomorrow I wanna have a closer look at it. I found out, that there was something buggy on the I²C port as well, but this should not be a general problem of my code because another I²C component in my design works fine. When I tried it with the same register values as you and with a valid signal on the S/PDIF input, the only output from the STA was the clock at the CLKOUT pin. For the PLL I used 4,7 nF instead of 5,6 nF, 'cause I didn't have this value. Do you think this matters a lot? Well, anyway I try to find out more tomorrow and then I'll write again. :)
Cheers
Holger