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/

New form of universal computation present in hundreds of systems

With an incredibly simple optical-electronic setup outperforming by cost digital/silicon on neural-networking like calculations.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3129

To our knowledge, the system presented here is the first analog readout for an experimental reservoir computer. While the results presented here are prelim- inary, and there is much optimization of experimental parameters to be done,the system already outperforms non-reservoir methods. We expect to extend easily this approach to different tasks, already studied in [9, 10], including a spoken digit recognition task on a standard dataset.3

Further performance improvements can reasonably be expected from fine- tuning of the training parameters: for instance the amount of regularization in the ridge regression procedure, that here is left constant at 1 · 10−4 , should  be tuned for best performance. Adaptive training algorithms, such as the ones mentioned in [21], could also take into account nonidealities in the readout components

Moreover the choice of τ, as Figure 3 shows, is not obvious and a
more extensive investigation could lead to better performance.
The architecture proposed here is simple and quite straightforward to re-alize. It is very modular, meaning that it can be added at the output of any preexisting time multiplexing reservoir with minimal effort, whether it is based on optics or electronics. The capacitor at the end of the circuit could probably
be substituted with a more complicated, active electronic circuit performing the summation of the incoming signal before resetting itself. This would eliminate the problem of residual voltages, and allow better performance at the cost of increased complexity of the readout. The main interest of the analog readout is that it allows optoelectronic reser-  voir computers to fully leverage their main characteristic, which is the speed of operation.

Indeed, removing the need for slow, offline postprocessing is indi- cated in [13] as one of the major challenges in the field. Once the training is finished, optoelectronic reservoirs can process millions of nonlinear nodes per second [10]; however, in the case of a digital readout, the node states must be recovered and postprocessed to obtain the reservoir outputs. It takes around 1.6 seconds for the digital readout in our setup to retrieve and digitize the states  generated by a 9000 symbol input sequence. The analog readout removes the need for postprocessing, and can work at a rate of about 8.5 μs per input sym- bol, five orders of magnitude faster than the electronic reservoir reported in  [8].

Finally, having an analog readout opens the possibility of feedback - using the output of the reservoir as input or part of an input for the successive time steps. This opens the way for different tasks to be performed [15] or different  training techniques to be employed [14].

  The supplementary materials pdf from the nature link  http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120227/srep00287/full/srep00287.html has some more interesting stuff about how it's not just optoelectronic mediums that can do this effect, it's a new universal form of computation that is apparently possible over many different systems. They are still investigating new ways to do it but there seem to be hundreds. Important characteristics are symmetry breaking and other strange phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-optic_modulator

One last interesting tidbit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousto-optic_modulator Quartz 27 Mhz intensity modulators don't compare to Lithium niobate ~10 Ghz but they are vastly cheaper and since apparently this computation 'reservoir' thing is applicable even in a bucket of water (ridiculous, it used the waves or something to perform nonlinear computation.) it probably means there are cheap cheap ways of implementing this like quartz or some organic polymer.

Compared to the million of steps in semiconductor fabrication it's positively easy to construct one of these in relation. This paper only came out last week so obviously nobody is gonna manufacture them yet but if it beats the cost over time it could mean incredibly economical supercomputer production. These things are so simple you could 3d print them. (They've already 3d printed fiber and lasers and lenses etc. pretty easy, Fab Lab and other semiconductor projects are stuck in the mud in comparison to the ease of this process.)