We divide up our analysis by design component.
Our UART implementation is very clean. Although we performed some reverse-engineering on the SOPC builder's UART, we managed to maintain a very simple interface for receiving data over the UART.
The UART's main limitation is the fact that it has little bandwidth - a maximum data rate of 115kbps can be used on a modern PC. To transmit a 16-bit 48kHz audio stream, we need a data rate of at least 768kbps. Thus, we could not use RS-232 for streaming data, and could only use it for control. It is a shame, since using the UART is so easy!
When filling the external SRAM with coefficients (by clicking the StuffIt! button in the GUI), we send 500kB worth of data over the serial port, which takes roughly one minute. This time would have been reduced to mere seconds if we used ethernet to initialize the external SRAM, but ethernet was a late addition to our project, and we did not want to upset our working implementation with the UART.
Using RS-232 for changing azimuths and elevations (by clicking and dragging the mouse over the 2-D plot in the GUI) worked very well. Even with sudden mouse movements, the UART did not skip any azimuth or elevation commands, as shown using signal tap.
On the PC side, we used the C# System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class, which works just like any other stream in C# (file streams, HTTP streams, etc) and are extremely easy to work with. For example, the following code sets up communication on COM1, and dumps the digits 0 through 99 to the serial port
System.IO.Ports.SerialPort s = new SerialPort("COM1", 115200, Partiy.None, 8, StopBits.One); s.Open(); // open serial port stream byte b = new byte; for (int i=0; i<100; i++) b[i] = i; s.Write(b, 0, 100); // write 100 bytes
The ethernet was exceedingly painful to get working. It took between 50 and 60 man-hours to get the hardware ethernet driver fully working. The DM9000A chip uses indirect addressing for its internal registers, which normally would not complicate interfacing with the chip. However, akward setup/hold times, as well as long sequential procedures complicated matters.
For example, to read the first data word (2-bytes) from an ethernet packet requires a read from the DM9000A's 0xF0 register, followed a 4-cycle delay, followed by a read from the DM9000A's 0xF2 register. Then, to get subsequent words, we read DM9000A's 0xF2 register, with one cycle of delay in between reads. Handling cases such as these would be easy in a software driver (adding nops, and using loops). But in hardware it is very difficult, and as such our ethernet code is fairly ugly.
Once the ethernet was working, however, it received the correct data from the PC, and performed sufficient for our read-only application. It was too complicated to implement flow control in the hardware ethernet driver, and as such we simply used the ethernet link as read-only, reading in audio data from the PC. The nature of the DM9000A is such that it will throw away any incoming frames once its buffer is full. Since we don't have a method for the DM9000A to tell the PC that its buffer is full, we have to ensure that the PC doesn't send more than 13kB of data at a time, and that the DM9000A's buffer is never full.
It would have been orders of magnitude easier to use a NIOS II CPU running at high speed and done the ethernet driver in software.
In any case, ethernet provides plenty of bandwidth for us to use in our system. For each mono, 16-bit, 48kHz audio stream we only need ~750kbps of throughput to transfer the data. Since ethernet runs at 100Mbit, there is plenty of room for expansion into many more streams.
On the PC side, we found an ethernet driver online that allowed us to send raw data over ethernet. We were lucky to find this with a simple C# interface.
Our HRTF design of separating the control logic from the filters themselves worked very well. On one hand, we had audio streams being filtered by our FIR filters, each using their own local coefficient RAMs and storing their own past samples. Interactions between the control updater and the FIR filters was simply a matter of changing the input to the local coefficient RAM output muxes, a single bit for each channel being sent to a filter. This let us completely decouple UART control from the audio streams, and worked very well.
When we were designing our project, we were unsure if changing all of the filter coefficients in a single cycle would cause a noticeable change in audio quality. We thought there might be clicks, or volume fade-in's and fade-out's as our ears adjusted to the new azimuth and elevations. However, the system works smoothly, and there are no audible artifacts from changing azimuth and elevations, even if drastic changes are made to azimuths and elevations.
The audio quality of our system varied depending on the audio stream, the subject's coefficients being used, and the music being listened to. For example, if we played the Windows 'ding' sound through the audio DAC, we could hear some cracking of the music whenever ding pulses began, no matter what the elevation or azimuth. But, if we play rock music, we only hear cracking at extreme azimuths and elevations (near the boundary of the 2-D plot in the GUI). This can be attributed to one or more reasons:
Playing multiple audio streams through our filter was an interesting experience. In a non-HRTF audio system, if two songs are being played through the same set of headphones, it is hard to separate one band from the other. However, using our system, if we positioned one audio stream to our upper right, for example, and positioned the other audio stream to our lower left, we could clearly hear two bands, as if they were playing in the same room.
This effect could be extended to speech as well. In a room with many people holding many conversations (coming from different locations), the human brain is able to distinguish between conversations based on the fact that people are positioned differently in the room. Our HRTF system is able to mimic this, where a normal audio recording of many conversations will yield uncomprehensible audio.
Coefficients & Demoing Our Project
The full set of UC Davis coefficient contained 25 azimuths and 50 elevations (where we skip every other elevation, using only 25). We could have fit the entire coefficient set (~1MB) on the DE2's external SDRAM chip (8MB), but this would require an SDRAM controller, as using the SDRAM is non-trivial. However, by using half the elevations we bring our total coefficient table size to 500kB, which fits on the external SRAM (512kB) which is extremely simple to use.
We made some interesting observations concerning our use of coefficients and the user listening to the audio. We found that UC Davis subject 165's coefficients worked fairly well for both Eric & Brett, fairly well for Professor Land, and somewhat poorly for our TA, Paul Chen. Subject 165 is one of the mannequins used in the UC Davis experiments, and we thought it would be representative of a larger population (compared to human subjects), but this turned out not to work as well as we thought it would.
Upon further investigation, we found that Professor Land's ears are larger than Eric's & Brett's, and that Paul's ears are smaller. This would explain the discrepancy in the effectiveness of subject 165's coefficients. We tried the UC Davis subject 021 (mannequin with a small pinna) but again, primary effects (azimuth changes) were noticable, but secondary effects (elevations) did not work as well as they would have if we had coefficients reflective of Paul's ear shape.
Switches & Buttons
We used most of the switches and keys on the DE2 as debug mechanisms during the development of our project. The switches and buttons operate as follows:
Our chip utilization using 2 audio streams (and thus 4 filters) is:
The chip utilization is insignificant! We can very easily add another 10-15 audio streams without any modifications to our design. It is possible to achieve more streams (upwards of 100) if we make some changes to our storage techniques. For example, if we needed more multiply units, we could serialize some of the FIR filter multiplications (as opposed to performing all of them in parallel) which would require another state machine, as well as a faster clock. We could run our logic off the 50MHz clock for more performance if necessary. There are many other optimizations which can be done, including transmitting more information (such as coeffients or previous samples) over ethernet, as we are not limited in ethernet bandwidth.
For reference, we used 1239 logic elements in our design, approximately 200 of that dedicated to ethernet. A small NIOS II processor uses only 600-700 logic elements and so we would advise using a NIOS II to handle the ethernet interface instead of pure hardware. For minimal additional hardware, ethernet processing should be greatly simplified.
Other Design Considerations
We considered using USB to transfer our data, as that would provide enough bandwidth for several extra audio stream to be used in our system. However, in looking up the USB hardware driver (and also using the USB port on a PC to send the audio stream) this seemed significantly more difficult than using the ethernet port.
We also considered transmitting two streams of data into the audio ADC, by putting a mono audio stream into the left channel of the input audio, and another stream into the right channel. However, this did not add much value to our project as this approach is not scalable to any more than 2 streams. Our goal was to create a many-stream scalable system, and adding another stream in the audio ADC input did little for that goal.
During our many hours of development and testing, we would occasionally have the headphones on (attached to the DE2 audio output) while the audio input streams were null. Basically, we should have been listening to nothing at all, but (presumably) interference from the DE2 was causing a slight hum in the audio output, which we could hear through the headphones. This is expected, as on a board containing many electronic components operating at various frequencies such as the DE2.
What was not expected is that we could hear what the DE2 was doing. As we were waiting for a trigger in Signal Tap, the hum would get loud, right up until Signal Tap triggered, and the hum volume went down. This has no affect to our HRTF system, as the hum is fairly quiet, but we thought it was interesting enough to write in this report.
We are very pleased with our project. We were able to get multiple streams (over multiple mediums) to work, and for them to be positioned correctly. We were able to clearly distinguish two bands as they were positioned in different locations, where it would be very difficult if they were not positioned at all.
Our architecture need not deal with HRTF alone. Currently, we have real-time filtering of 16-bit samples with 200-tap FIR filters. These can be used for anything at all! In fact, with a modification that the FPGA is able to reprogram its own coefficients through a ROM, it is then possible to create a complete filtering system capable of non-adaptive and adaptive filtering!
Lastly, we both had a great time working on the project. Neither of us had really worked with audio filtering before (or filtering in general), so we both learned a great deal. Also, working with the DE2 for real-time filtering was more interesting than performing audio simulations using MATLAB.