I have a small project where I have a Beagle Board Black plugged into a back plane interfacing to several daughter cards on the opposite side over an I2C bus. In addition to controlling the daughter cards I'd like to have the Beagle Board Black stream stereo audio over an I2S bus to a DAC for L/R audio output. (The audio streaming is independent of the daughter card control interface.) There are three pins on P9 that are the same signals used to stream audio to the HDMI interface and I'd like to interface those pins to a PCM5100A Audio Stereo DAC. I have several very basic questions about integrating such a component and I've list them below. Hopefully answers to these will get me moving in the right direction.
1. Is there a better approach to generating stereo audio from the Beagle Board than what I have stated above? If so, can you please elaborate.
2. If this component if compatible, what issues am I facing such as driver availability, OS compatibility and so on? I'm aware of stereo in the HDMI output but that is not an option.
3. Only recently have I become aware of ALSA. Can you tell me the impact/advantage/etc if any ALSA has to do with the Beagle Board and an off Beagle Board audio DAC?
4. I am a hardware engineer by education and experience and the questions are most likely very fundamental. Can you please tell me other related issues and areas I need to get smart in to make this work. In other words, can you please point me in the right direction. I'm usually pretty good at taking it from there.
Many thanks in advance for input and guidance.
john
