While Chris is focusing on the hardware to connect USRP daughterboards
to the Beagle Board, I am thinking about software and whatever you call
the FPGA definition (no, I will not get drawn into the hardware/software
argument).
GNU Radio appears to be the most popular open source SDR package. It is
heavily oriented toward to desktop PC class machines, however since the
beagle has floating point capability, this is not as much of a problem
as it would be for FPU-less machines. Things that would be good
additions to GNU Radio:
1) NEON implementations of the core signal processing code. Eric has
already shown how this would be structured with his Altivec work.
2) Create equivalent of gr-usrp to get data from the FPGA.
3) fftw that can use NEON.
The Beagle expansion connector supports several different interfaces. We
need to develop FPGA firmware that can send/receive data and commands
via these interfaces. It would be good to create some sample
implementations and see which interfaces are better than others. I am
looking into purchasing a dev board and an expansion board to test the
beagle hardware interfaces. Any help here would be great :) Also, I am
hopeful the pins on the FPGA can direct connect to the Beagle Board
pins. It would be nice if someone who was good at this could check :)
I also did a real quick skim of SDR-Shell + dttsp this morning. This may
be another way to use the hw.
Philip
PS: Anyone have any suggestions for a "cheap" logic analyzer from ebay,
suitable for working with a cyclone III?
