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The Pi has kicked off some interest in hardware hacking for myself too. My question is how hard would it be to embed an 802.11 radio into the same board for a d

The Pi has kicked off some interest in hardware hacking for myself too. My question is how hard would it be to embed an 802.11 radio into the same board for a discreet sensor project

stephen_g 15y ago
I haven't looked at the schematics yet, but generally a SoC based design like this needs at least a six layer board, which combined with the speeds it runs at is pretty advanced electronic design... Coupled with that, it can be really hard to get low volumes of some of the parts they use, like the SoC, PMIC (power management IC) and so on (although you can get free samples if you ask sometimes - but they generally won't give them to you unless there's a chance you'll put through a big order with them in the future). And soldering the BGA parts onto the board would be a pain unless you pay for it to be assembled for you... Unless you know a lot about that sort of thing, it would probably be more successful to design something that interfaces with a Pi.
- sveiss 15y ago
  My university had a wonderful pair of courses in the first year of its CS degree. The first had us build a Z80-based computer on breadboards, with a couple of hulking ancient HP logic analyzers to debug with. For the second, they gave us an assembled Z80 single board computer and had us do something interesting with it -- games displayed on an oscilloscope, control a small robot, etc. For both courses compilers were strictly forbidden. It was a great way of bridging the abstraction gap between the physical hardware and the code we typed at the keyboard. (We were also required to take courses in basic digital and analogue design and compiler construction to give an overview the rest of the stack, too.) Nowadays, I think they've switched to using ARM boards for the second course in the build-a-computer series. From a hardware reliability and cost perspective it makes sense, but it's a little sad that the "I built one like this! Just not quite so neatly..." factor has been lost. As a software guy, the details of the Pi's PCB layout are about as impenetrable to me as the internals of the SoC itself are. It's Magic Electronic Stuff!, but just a tad more powerful than the Z80 I used to play with.

The Pi has kicked off some interest in hardware hacking for myself too. My question is how hard would it be to embed an 802.11 radio into the same board for a discreet sensor project

stephen_g 15y ago

I haven't looked at the schematics yet, but generally a SoC based design like this needs at least a six layer board, which combined with the speeds it runs at is pretty advanced electronic design... Coupled with that, it can be really hard to get low volumes of some of the parts they use, like the SoC, PMIC (power management IC) and so on (although you can get free samples if you ask sometimes - but they generally won't give them to you unless there's a chance you'll put through a big order with them in the future). And soldering the BGA parts onto the board would be a pain unless you pay for it to be assembled for you... Unless you know a lot about that sort of thing, it would probably be more successful to design something that interfaces with a Pi.

sveiss 15y ago
My university had a wonderful pair of courses in the first year of its CS degree. The first had us build a Z80-based computer on breadboards, with a couple of hulking ancient HP logic analyzers to debug with. For the second, they gave us an assembled Z80 single board computer and had us do something interesting with it -- games displayed on an oscilloscope, control a small robot, etc. For both courses compilers were strictly forbidden. It was a great way of bridging the abstraction gap between the physical hardware and the code we typed at the keyboard. (We were also required to take courses in basic digital and analogue design and compiler construction to give an overview the rest of the stack, too.) Nowadays, I think they've switched to using ARM boards for the second course in the build-a-computer series. From a hardware reliability and cost perspective it makes sense, but it's a little sad that the "I built one like this! Just not quite so neatly..." factor has been lost. As a software guy, the details of the Pi's PCB layout are about as impenetrable to me as the internals of the SoC itself are. It's Magic Electronic Stuff!, but just a tad more powerful than the Z80 I used to play with.