Hi everyone,
I am a newcomer on this list and would like to first introduce myself.
I am a HW design engineer with over 20 years of experience in designing
various
electronic and systems including a working base station based on SW
radio in
1999 with a team of engineers at Ericsson Radio Access in Sweden, a
system that
managed to support multiple mobiles systems including NMT, GSM, AMPS,
DAMPS and
DECT using a number of FPGAs and DSPs. My specialty is FPGA design and I
would
like to move some of the GNU radio blocks into an FPGA to make it
possible to
run the SW part on a low end processor such as ARM9 or similar.
After many years, I came back to into the field of working on a RBS
design and
found the wonderful project called Gnu Radio 
Now, my questions, I wonder if anyone here has ever looked into using
some old
FPGA boards such Avnemt Memec Virtex-II pro board with P160 analog
interface
board together with Gnu Radio? The reason I am asking this is that I
have a few
of these boards from previous project and I believe they could be great
HW for a
quick start of the GR design with minimum amount of investment.
Thanks in advance and best regards,
Farhad A.
Antibes, France
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Farhad A. [email protected]
wrote:
similar.
investment.
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Farhad A. [email protected]
wrote:
similar.
investment.
Thanks in advance and best regards,
Farhad A.
Antibes, France
Hi Farhad,
I have not heard of anyone using the Avnemt Memec board for GNU Radio.
What are your plans with it? From a quick read about the product, I
was wondering if you were thinking of trying to get GNU Radio to run
on the internal PowerPC or to make the Memec board a peripheral front
end and pass samples back to a host computer. I didn’t look closely
enough at the board to know what it’s external interfaces might be
(USB, Ethernet, PCI, etc.). I didn’t see what kind of PowerPC they are
using, so you’d have to ask yourself if it is powerful enough to do
what you want onboard or if you want to offload it to a more capable
processor.
Let us know if you’re making any progress on it.
Tom
Hi Tom,
I am giving up on that idea, as much as I love my old boards, it seems
like
porting the Gnu Radio to that processor it is not worth much at this
stage since
the processor is too slow for any serious processing compare to modern
Cortex A8
based processors.
I think I have to learn to walk before I start a marathon 
so for now
I am
learning the basics of GR and use the audio card as the data source
together
with a small board I ‘breadboard’:ed for this. Maybe my next step will
be to use
the Friendly ARM board with the GR, but I am not sure, I am still
hopping on one
foot!
Best regards,
/Farhad
From: Tom R. [email protected]
To: Farhad A. [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: Mon, January 17, 2011 5:53:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Greeting and a question
Hi Farhad,
I have not heard of anyone using the Avnemt Memec board for GNU Radio.
What are your plans with it? From a quick read about the product, I
was wondering if you were thinking of trying to get GNU Radio to run
on the internal PowerPC or to make the Memec board a peripheral front
end and pass samples back to a host computer. I didn’t look closely
enough at the board to know what it’s external interfaces might be
(USB, Ethernet, PCI, etc.). I didn’t see what kind of PowerPC they are
using, so you’d have to ask yourself if it is powerful enough to do
what you want onboard or if you want to offload it to a more capable
processor.
Let us know if you’re making any progress on it.
Tom
HI Tom,
I am afraid not, first of all OMAP is under export restriction from the
US
government that means it can not be sold (or should not be sold) without
US
export control.
Second, this board is a nice toy, but I can not justify $1300 for the
functionality that E100 gives.
Best regards,
Farhad
From: Tom R. [email protected]
To: Farhad A. [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: Mon, January 17, 2011 6:27:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Greeting and a question
That sounds like a reasonable approach.
When you’re ready, you should probably look at the Ettus USRP-E100,
which uses an ARM-based OMAP processor. That seems like it’s pretty
much the form-factor you are looking for.
Tom
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Farhad A. [email protected]
wrote:
hopping on one foot!
Best regards,
/Farhad
That sounds like a reasonable approach.
When you’re ready, you should probably look at the Ettus USRP-E100,
which uses an ARM-based OMAP processor. That seems like it’s pretty
much the form-factor you are looking for.
Tom
Hi all,
Am disappointed with the way GNURadio is getting into.
I see all the discussion around is to promote the products of Ettus
Research.
Agreed!. Great work from Ettus R…
But there are many boards available which are far better in capability
vs
price. I don’t want to mention them here to deviate the concern.
During the market for USRP1, no one in the forum focused discussion on
embedded platform. When queries regarding any such embedded platform was
posted, there were lot of quotes saying GNURadio is focused on
developing
SDR framework based on Desktop based solution. With Ettus R.
coming
out with USRP E100, everyone on is bouncing on embedded platform.
I wonder; Is GNURadio biased with Ettus Reserch ?. My obvious
understanding
is NO!.
Its the community of people driving Ettus products into market. The
potential of doing so is to make money. Either way, Ettus R. is
now
part of National Instruments and may be now GNURadio be delinked with
Ettus
Research for being open source. There are many people who can contribute
low
cost open source solutions.
Initially, all the Hardware and software was part of GNURadio. All the
files
was part of free source available to download and use. In around a year
or
so all the files from GNURadio were moved out separating hardware and
software. All the hardware related files were not available after this.
Why
so, no one knows.
The boards when purchased from Ettus R. it was under terms and
conditions as free open source schematics for motherboard and free open
source schematics and pcb files.
Its time now for the community of people interested in building free
open
source platform including both software and Hardware to come out with an
complete open source low cost solution.
S—
