arXiv Index: SSRP High bandwidth cheap OS radio driver developement (mostly) finished!

Friday, September 21, 2012

SSRP High bandwidth cheap OS radio driver developement (mostly) finished!

>Mbps software defined radio package with data transmission drivers finally written implemented on OS hardware at least an order of magnitude cheaper than competitor Ettus Research. Some finishing touches still need to be added but it is working in tests.

GNURadio and hardware available for it before now has mainly targeted expensive, scientific research markets. Up until recently, the lowest entry machines were roughly $700 for high bandwidth, tunable radio links over Mhz spectrum. This device in conjunction with some tuners and amplifiers would make a fantastic longer-range alternative to Wifi for hard-to-create network links. Devices like this are already available but they tend to cost more than they are worth. This is a surprisingly steep drop in price.

This hardware is all open source based so it should be possible for anyone to put it together from any vendor, not necessarily the writer of these drivers.

As a side note, the same OS ADC chips are also going to impact the EEG market. Most companies ridiculously overcharge for a tiny number of probes. The ADCs used here are very similar to an EEG setup, although not identical, so it should impact open source EEG hardware projects, if it hasn't already. (The development of these cheap OS ADCs. (analogue to digital conversion chip.) )

Brief Status One Assembled LTC1746 ADC board available!
As of 10/14/2007 I have one LTC1746 assembled board available. I also have a few blank PCBs that I will sell separately or with the three ICs pre-installed. The assembled board is $120. Bare PCBs with documentation are $15. PCBs with the LTC1746, LP2989 and THS4501 installed are $60.

Phase Two Works! A new board featuring the MAX5190 8bit 40MHz is now under development. This new board will bring the capability to sythesize arbitrary waveforms of up to 20MHz bandwidth. The board has been assembled and successfully tested. See the MAX5190 board section.

The LTC1746 board works! The board is now in full production. Aquisition rates up to 15Msps (30MB/sec) have been tested and observed SNR exceeds 75db. More details (and pictures!) on this board are available in the LTC1746 board section. In the software side of things, simple asynchronus and synchronus data transfer firmware have been developed. Corresponding host utilities, a SSRP library and an initial GNURadio module have been completed as well. All code is available for download in the SSRP and gr-ssrp tarballs. Performance tests have reached 40.8MB/s average transfer rates.

http://oscar.dcarr.org/ssrp/

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