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The HPSDR FPGA_USB Boards Have Arrived

HPSDR FPGA_USB Boards:

The HPSDR FPGA_USB boards showed up today. I sent the design files off last week to PCBExpress and UPS delivered them today. They are 4 layer boards with silk screen and solder mask.

You can see some pics here:

http://www.philcovington.com/SDR/hpsdr_fpga_usb_board.html





Next I get to have fun soldering the 0.5mm pitch ICs...

Last time I reported that there was a long back order for the XILINX FPGA. Instead of 3-4 weeks as quoted I received my order in about 2 weeks. So I do have all of the components in hand.

I have had many emails from people asking me for more details on the FPGA_USB board. I plan to put up much more information on my website soon. Right now I need to concentrate on getting the prototype boards build up and debugged.

Real time Linux:

I decided to build a Linux From Scratch (LFS6.1) distro to patch with the latest from RTAI which is fusion-0.9. RTAI Fusion uses the ADEOS nanokernel. I got it done just before the boards arrived. It was a great learning experience. For LFS6.1 you basically use a host linux system (or the LFS Live CD) to build your system from source. You control exactly what software is installed and where. Next I customized it by adding Direct Framebuffer support
and Mono 1.1.9. This will be the stand-alone DSP processor running on a mini-itx motherboard which will boot from a flash drive. It will run a new version of SharpDSP under the Mono JIT written in, of course, C#.


AD9958:

I received a couple of samples of the Analog Devices AD9958 this week. It will be interesting to test them versus the AD9951/54 parts.


Stay tuned...

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