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NXP LA9310: A new platform for SDR and the 10-year-old AD9361 RF Transceiver
- nimish 4y agoWhy not use the ADRV9000 series? Or a newer afe like this guy: https://www.ti.com/product/AFE7903 https://www.ti.com/product/AFE7903
- cedivad 4y agoA few reasons: (1) The AFE7903 wouldn't allow for any modularity in the system (look at what we are calling the RFNM interface on the website, I think that's the real reason this platform will work), (2) Pricing, that single chip would cost in quantity 1k more than our current BOM, and you still need to add FPGAs, frontend, etc. next to it. (3) Those single chip frontend modules don't have the embedded DSP cores we can use to do things like processing FFTs in real time and feeding them to a browser with no computing on the host, which I think will be very cool (multiple 160 MHz FFTs with a gr-phosphor like visualisation I think has never been done before at this price point).
- qwezxcrty 4y agoCool, how much is it?
- cedivad 4y agoI can't commit to pricing before I have decided on a partner for the distribution (DIY vs Kickstarter vs Crowdsupply, they all come with different costs and tradeoffs), but $550 is my target retail price for the Motherboard + Granita + Dev Board + CNC enclosure combo. $450 if you are happy with the Granita Lite board. Everything will be sold separately. As a comparison, $550 would be 10x to 20x less expensive than what's on the market today for similar bandwidth specs (Aaronia Spectran V6 and Ettus USRP).
- themehdi 4y agoThis is amazing! I would buy one in this price range. What sort of help/contributions you need/expect from interested users? E.g. financial funding on CrowdSupply, beta testing, feature wishlist, etc.
- cedivad 4y agoWe need volumes, so the best I can hope for is people join the waitlist and pre-order when we show a functioning prototype. We already placed sizeable orders with the manufacturers and have the first batch planned for September, but further batches are probably going to be delayed into 2024 (we can't start asking for preorders before the product is tested, which is going to take time, so we can't preorder those chips early like we did for the first batch). Feature wishlist: please! Do send them our way. Especially if it's hardware, this is the right time!
- themehdi 4y agoThanks. I have followed you on Twitter, and will discuss this with my RF fellas and get back to you on Discord or email. However, for now, I could mention 2 things that can be attractive to me as a radio amateur and RF hobbyist: 1. Any daughter board that can provide HF coverage, ideally with a few filters for the ham bands. 2. A proper shielding enclosure (shield from external noise, plus provide some heat dissipation) and 3rd would be on the software side: support in Soapy and GNURadio (osmosdr) but I guess that would eventually come from the community. This is exciting, and as supporter of previous open source SDR projects, I'm looking forward to more updates and news from you.
- cedivad 4y ago:-) The HF daughterboard is the only thing that's missing, I think. To be honest, I was hoping for someone to suggest a nice design on that front. Here is a render of the enclosure (work in progress): https://i.imgur.com/AEYgLxU.png https://i.imgur.com/AEYgLxU.png And of course we agree on the software side! Soapy + GNURadio are a must. Hopefully my driver-writing skills are up to the challenge!
- drmpeg 4y agoSorry, u.fl connectors are horrible and I'll never buy a product that uses them.
- cedivad 4y agoI don't like them either, but I couldn't find a better way to provide the clock in/out feature and still fit in that area of the board. The optional OCXO on the opposite side of the U.FL connectors doesn't help (can't do edge-launch mmcx, for example), and if you move down you would ruin the legend for the user interface connector. But fair feedback, noted. I can't move the optional OCXO below the enclosure, as that would be taller than the aluminium block itself and require a slot breaking the RF shielding, but maybe I can move the connectors. I'll try and get creative. Edit, surface-mount MMCX to the rescue? https://i.imgur.com/1GJhJa6.png https://i.imgur.com/1GJhJa6.png
- drmpeg 4y agoI wouldn't change things on my account. I certainly understand the density advantage to u.fl connectors. They just grind my gears. Best of luck with the project. I couldn't find anything on "Granita". Is it called "SnowWings" now?
- cedivad 4y agoNo, I think your feedback is fair, MMCX connectors are certainly more durable. Maybe the tradeoff there is that they are not as common, so I might need to include adapters as well. I would like to have them on the opposite side of the board, so that we can maybe enclose them with the CNC enclosure which would make it truly pull resistant. The Granita is technically unreleased, the manufacturer has been making changes to the packaging of the chip as recently as a couple of months ago. It's based on the same silicon as the IceWings: https://arcticsemiconductor.com/icewings/ https://arcticsemiconductor.com/icewings/
- bjt2n3904 4y agoThey will be the first thing to break. I can't stand the amount of fragile connectors people keep installing on expensive boards. My BladeRF's micro USB 3.0 sheared off. USB-C is even a bit contentious for me. USB-A with the 3.0 extensions is much more durable.
- ejolto 4y agoVery cool PCB routing, I wonder what tool they use to get those smooth organic looking traces.
- vodou 4y agoJust trying to get my head around SDR. What are some examples of practical use cases for a platform like this? What are the benefits of this SDR platform compared to other solutions?
- armcat 4y agoThis site has some great examples on what various inexpensive SDR hardware can be used for: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/. Use cases range from receiving weather satellite imagery, to reverse engineering radio protocols (e.g. for remote door openers). Several years ago I used an inexpensive DVB USB dongle containing the RTL2832U chip (which enables SDR), to sniff 2G/GSM broadcast packets.
- ajb 4y agoMany radio systems are already SDR, just closed. The benefits are the same as building anything into software rather than hardware: you can update it later, support more variations, etc. The downside is more power consumption, so cellphone radios are not usually completely SDR (not an expert on those so correct me if I'm wrong)
- cedivad 4y agoA few practical use cases that are not easily covered by similar platforms: 1) Direction finding thanks to the 8x 153 MSPS ADCs and coherent clocks. 2) Mixed domain analyzer: have one daughterboard act as a RF receiver, and at the same time sample an analogue voltage with the other one. This is a capability reserved to the most expensive of test equipment and lets you analyze how a RF switch is behaving (or do side channel attacks?). 3) Sample almost 600 MHz of bandwidth in real time, use the powerful DSP core to run FFTs on it and send the results over to a browser that implements a RTSA display. This lets you have a real-time view of the spectrum around you for just a few watts. Thanks to the double-PPLs on the Granita board, you can also sweep the spectrum very fast. 4) There is enough processing power onboard to enable RFNM as a 5G RedCap node. We are working with NXP to add an eSIM, so with the right software, this can become a fully-functional 5G UE and connect to the normal cell network. Don't care about 5G? You can write your own standard and deploy it on the same hardware (the limitation here is having access to NXP's DSP development tools, which might limit the processing to the beefy i.MX 8M Plus, but some cores will be available as binaries). 5) Technically, anything requiring an insane amount of ADCs and DACs. You can implement your own board, as the heavy lifting (the motherboard) is already done for you. You could prototype something easily with the development board that's on the website and turn it into a real design within weeks.
- ajb 4y agoAs usual, "taking over the scrolling" causes issues - in this case, the page is difficult to access using Firefox for Android. I usually can't get to the information at the bottom of the page (it worked once, don't know how)
- zbrozek 4y agoI gave up trying to read the page for these reasons.
- cedivad 4y agoIs this with an older Firefox version maybe? I've tried with a relatively recent one and couldn't reproduce, but I'll look at the logs and try to fix this now that the HN storm has passed :-)
- zbrozek 4y agoFirefox mobile on Android 111.1.0 I abandon all sites that override scroll because they're too frustrating to read.
- ptero 4y agoAs a data point (another aFF on Android) I could scroll down, but the experience is painful. I am interested in SDRs and have a bunch of HackFRs and dongles, but the page was very off-putting. I suspect most tinkerers that would be interested in this hardware would love an option to see all this on a static web page.
- ajb 4y agoIt seems to work a bit better now but it looks like it isn't working as the page stops when it goes into a transition. There's a writers maxim, "murder your darlings". what they mean is that a work often has some styling, phrases, exposition, even whole characters or subplots that the writer has worked hard on and become attached to, but that detract from the work as a whole. So they have to be removed. I think this may be a darling unfortunately.
- fadedsignal 4y agoIt is really cool. I have some questions. > There are two embedded antennas to ensure that we can always correct any internal frequency drift by syncing to the cell network. What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it? Aside from that, - What is the compatibility with open source LTE, 5G solutions(SRS, OAI, etc.)? - I couldn't see PPS input. Are you planning to add it with daughterboards?
- cedivad 4y agoPPS input/output is off to the side, look for the "User Interface Connector" paragraph on the website. > What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it? You can quickly pause whatever is running on the LA9310, push the NXP NLM stack, correct local frequency errors by synching to a cell network tower and then resume normal operation. It's going to cause a glitch, but if you want to maintain frequency accuracy it's a small cost you need to pay. Once you have absolute deviation and drift it should track quite well. My understanding is that SRS and the like all require beefy desktop-class processors to run in?
- fadedsignal 4y ago> My understanding is that SRS and the like all require beefy desktop-class processors to run in? Yes. You can ignore this question. I should have asked you the driver first. I think you replied that question already on another comment. Thx for your explanation. Looking forward to seeing it in the market soon.
- cedivad 4y agoI designed this system (not the chip, clearly), so feel free to ask any questions!
- gaudat 4y agoSeeing the spec I thought there is a Zynq but iMX6 looks even better. Can I get this board as an individual hobbyist instead of a company?
- cedivad 4y ago*i.MX 8M Plus, please :-) The 8M Plus is not that different from the RPi4! Yes, of course, this will be sold to anybody and be very, very competitive, like in the order of ~$550 including the Granita board ($100 less for GranitaLite).
- gaudat 4y agoI stand corrected. IMX 8M plus. 550 that is a nice price compared to say LimeSDR. I will be sure to grab one when its available.
- rasz 4y agoare the chips available anywhere? https://www.nxp.com/part/LA9310X7S11AA#/ https://www.nxp.com/part/LA9310X7S11AA#/ "Lead Time: 52" doesnt sound encouraging.
- cedivad 4y agoYou need to work directly with NXP. Our first big batch will be here in September. We could have had them earlier but there are plenty of different moving parts, things to do and software to write, so September is a good compromise. But yes, the long lead time is the reason for the waitlist!
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoThe board layout triggers my OCD :) Why the weird angle of those main ICs? Usually it's 45 degrees or parallel to the board.