I added a module to the project which is capable of generating fully formatted serial output. This is not really directly related to S/PDIF receiving of course but it helps to have a module that can quickly send debugging output to the serial port, e.g. for debugging the subchannel decoder as I tried to do in the previous log. And this should definitely be fast enough: the theoretical bitrate is a whopping 8 megabits per second, though the measured throughput at 3mbps (the highest speed that a Prop Plug and the Propeller Terminal will allow) is about 250,000 characters per second -- still pretty respectable compared to the 115200 maximum bit rate of the Full Duplex Serial module from the Parallax library.

By "fully formatted", I mean:

• Text: nul-terminated strings or fixed-length arrays of characters stored in the hub, unfiltered or filtered (i.e. unprintable characters replaced by a period)
• Numbers: bytes, words or longwords (or arrays of any of those), in decimal (signed or unsigned), binary or hexadecimal.
• Memory hexdump: combination of the address, hex bytes and filtered ASCII in the usual format address/hexdump/filtered-ascii

The module can be easily controlled from Spin or from PASM: commands are passed through a single longword with bit fields. All you do is wait for the longword to be 0 (indicating the cog is done with the previous command) and set it to the value that represents the new command.

I called the module TXX.spin and uploaded it to the Parallax Object Exchange (OBEX), at http://obex.parallax.com/object/870 (Update: OBEX is no longer available. You can get TXX from my Github repo at https://github.com/JacGoudsmit/TXX). I also wrote a post in the Parallax forums at https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/167981/txx-8mbps-serial-transmitter-with-extended-features-for-use-by-pasm-and-spin-code.