[HN Gopher] BladeRF-wiphy: Open-source, software defined radio m...
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BladeRF-wiphy: Open-source, software defined radio modem
Author : nuand
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-01-17 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nuand.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nuand.com)
| stagger87 wrote:
| Impressive project. Writing all the VHDL including the FFT and
| Viterbi decoder... I'm genuinely curious where the ROI on a
| project like comes from? Selling hardware and training materials?
| I'm assuming there must have been significant interest from
| customers, or maybe this is an ambitious employees side project?
|
| Can't wait to see a demo or some pictures of it running.
|
| Would love to see more details about the DSSS demod using the
| 20MHz rate, specifically regarding the correlation. Any
| references on this?
|
| (I'm a happy owner of the x115, been looking at the 2.0 for
| awhile now)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Oddly enough, some folks like doing this because of the
| dopamine hit of _really_ understanding how something works.
| FWIW I 'm that kind of person :-). But I certainly understand
| it isn't for everyone.
|
| The platform I've been using to explore stuff like this is an
| Ultra96 board with a LimeSDR as the receiver. The Ultra96 has
| the Zynq Ultrascale FPGA on it. Given that USB3 latency is < 10
| uSec I am guessing (hoping?) I can implement it in the
| Ultrascale fabric which is fed IQ data from the USB 3.1 port.
| csboyer wrote:
| For DSSS demod, my guess is a 20 tap match filter designed from
| a resampled RRC filtered barker sequence. Haven't looked at the
| VHDL, but that's how I'd do it.
| samstave wrote:
| How is it that an SDR is being praised for a $1K price-point, but
| I can buy an FM/AM radio for single-digit $ - yet I pay $1,000
| for a cell phone today and it doesnt have a native FM/AM radio on
| it?
|
| People keep saying "just use data" - which is what I think to be
| a fn bullshit response. give me a device that has actual FM/AM
| capabilities natively.
|
| Seriously - the most high-tech wireless device in my pocket MUST
| include the * _least*_ complex wifi capabilities which is over
| 100 years old by * _DEFAULT*_
|
| Assume you are out if signal range - there are FEW places out of
| FM/AM range...
| wmf wrote:
| Weirdly they keep saying 802.11 but apparently it's 802.11a/g.
| axegon_ wrote:
| Veeery impressive! Side note: By pure coincidence I spent 5-6
| hours this weekend playing around with an sdr dongle and a
| raspberry pi (specifically sending images over fm). And I have to
| say, the ecosystem around sdr's is annoyingly poor on
| linux(unsure about other os-es but it does seem windows has it
| better).
| ronsor wrote:
| I feel like it's easier to toy around on Windows, but if you
| want to do anything (and I mean anything) serious, you'll need
| Linux. That's been my experience anyway.
| nimbius wrote:
| congratulations to the team for the hard work and dedication to
| taking one step closer to a truly open source ap.
|
| but BladeRF is pushing...a thousand dollars...too rich for most
| :(
| the_only_law wrote:
| My very limited knowledge of SDR's from when I was researching
| a project is that for a lot of use cases, the cheap ones just
| don't have the bandwidth or frequency range. I ended up getting
| a limesdr which was enough to serve my needs, but it was still
| around $400 for the usb version.
| jacquesm wrote:
| https://www.nuand.com/product/bladerf-xa4/ $480 for the
| smallest.
|
| And while too rich for most is one way to look at it, another
| is that $1K would not even buy you a proper monitor all that
| long ago, and that this is a very low volume production. I
| think the price point is actually quite impressive, I expected
| it to cost substantially more, especially given the BOM, there
| are some pretty impressive bits on there, and those connectors
| and PCB are also not exactly free.
| invokestatic wrote:
| I do not think wiphy runs on the xA4 because the FPGA is not
| powerful enough. So if you want to run this project, you'll
| need to shell out at least $720 for the xA9. I probably will.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Nice. There goes another 3 weeks of my life :-).
| chrissnell wrote:
| I remember the hate that closed-source Winmodem got back in the
| 90s but software-defined modems can be far superior to hardware.
| Case in point: direwolf. I think it decodes APRS better than any
| hardware solution.
|
| https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf
| vvanders wrote:
| If you like direwolf you might want to take a peek at the M17
| project[1]. They're looking to do the same thing with what's
| happened with proprietary radio protocols and looks really
| promising:
|
| > M17 is a new digital radio protocol in development as an
| alternative to those currently available, with freedom in mind.
| Freedom in the code, protocol, voice codecs, and hardware. The
| goal is to provide a better option for digital radios in the
| future.
|
| [1] https://m17project.org/
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18581271
| Reventlov wrote:
| Related projects:
|
| - https://github.com/bastibl/gr-ieee802-11 (gnuradio transceiver
| by the amazing Bastian Bloessl)
|
| - https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi (efforts to make a low-
| cost SDR Wi-Fi transceiver)
|
| From my point of view, cool projects, all the hardware I have
| access to is closed source and sometimes I really wish I could
| just change some low level parameters in my Wi-Fi cards.
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