Thursday, December 3, 2009

Still alive and working hard

Hi,

despite not writing anything in here, I have been working on a new version of the dongle and on many other things.

First, I'm now in hardware design: look at the new signal samplers, my personal joy and pride :)

Fig.1: Primo USB dongles: very flexible GNSS data samplers.

These have the same functionality of the old CPLD version, but are more slick and robust. Eheh!

Second, I'm playing with a new platform:

Fig.2: The Gumstix Overo Earth runs our software GNSS receiver.

Above is one of our dongles connected to a Gumstix OVERO earth carrier board. Not only the OMAP3503 can reliably record the raw GNSS stream, but it is also capable of processing 16 GPS -or Galileo BOC(1,1)- channels in real-time, continuously!
To do that, quite some assembly code had to be written (especially for the FFTs!). The NEON core within the Cortex-A8 is a wonderful machine, and the learning curve with gcc is very acceptable. I won't give more details of how we did it, just want to share -again- my joy and pride :)

To finish, this time I HAVE TO thank all my colleagues-friends working hard with me at NSL, and the opensource community of the Beagleboard and the BeagleSDR project.

Cheers!
Mic

P.S.: Next post is coming soooon...