[Mep-dev] TI OMAP

[Bob McGwier]

I strongly recommend the beagleboard AND the Intel ATOM be pursued.

I and several others known to you have one of the Beagleboards.   Jadon 
(from TI) is really helping us along with NEON (SIMD floating point 
engine) and fixed point DSP programs.

http://beagleboard.org

The FPGA will be needed to do the high speed TDM downlink and all 
decoding.  The rate will be too high.  Encoding (FEC and compression) 
and modulation of the ground stream will be more than enough the OMAP or 
ATOM to do.  


JUST IN CASE the OMAP is currently underpowered,  many of us are also 
building ATOM330 systems in MiniITX form for other reasons and this 
also.   I do not believe this is the end of this road.  It is completely 
clear that Intel has absolutely no intention of ceding the small hand 
held and low power market to ARM and/or TI when it is clear INTEL 
themselves believe the small mobile market, requiring lower power and 
smaller footprint, will be the future.  I even believe that Google's 
long term vision of delivering RESTful services from server farms to 
handheld devices, turning into javascript super engines,  will be the 
"program" installation of much of the future. 

The difference is Intel is coming at it from the "top side down".  TI 
and ARM (OMAP in other words) are coming from the bottom (embedded 
world) up.  The meeting in the middle will give us a very large range of 
beautiful devices for our needs.

The ATOM mobo of choice in my opinion is the D945GCLF2.  It is a core 2 
duo based with each core hyperthreaded,  1.67 GHz system using 667 MHz 
DDR2.  It has serial, GigE, USB 2.0, parallel port,   VGA connector 
output (it drives my 52 inch Sony Bravia beautifully and is now my 
MythTV (Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64),  Winblows XP64 (Winblows required for both 
Netflix and  Rhapsody software).  The entire computer, included a disk 
drive from the junk box and a firewire card from the junk box, memory 
from the junk box, free Ubuntu and a never used Windows XP64 
installation disk was $200.  The mobo is $80 - $100 depending on where 
you go.  NewEgg and Tiger are out.  I got my last one for my wifes new 
internet/email/music machine from Amazon.

Back on OMAP/Beagle:

The beagle board is running Angstrom.  It really is a credible Linux 
computer.  The development will be necessarily cross platform.  BUT,  TI 
has made the development tools free (Code Composer Studio for both Linux 
and Winblows).

The OMAP processors are running Cortex A8,  ARMv11, the latest ARM 
embedded processor with NEON SIMD,  and TMS320C64X.  The former 
computational engine is 4 wide floats (128 bit) SIMD and does byte, 
shorts, ints.  320C64X is fixed point 16 bit.

Philip Balaster (Va. Tech graduate,  embedded processor guru,  GnuRadio 
contributor,  soon be a contractor with me working on Tilera Tile64 Pro 
and OMAP processors for LTS at U. Md.) and I are working on OMAP3530 code.

Frank Brickle,  Phil Covington,  and MANY others who have followed us 
down the road, are doing ATOM 330 work.  I am about to drop my polyphase 
filter work into the code running PowerSDR and DttSP so the 
computational complexity will go way down.  The PFB guru, fred harris 
(San Diego State, Qualcomm consultant,  adjunct at CCR working for me) 
and I have been doing lots of PFB work in the last year.  It is coming 
along beautifully.

BOTH will require people of serious intent and capability to succeed.  
On the FPGA,  we lost what many would argue is the world's greatest 
resource with the death of Jeff Mock from cancer.  What a bloody waste.  
It really is time to take one aircraft carrier off the drawing board and 
spend the money on medicine (off soapbox).

Gemma is uWSDR doing what APPEARS to be good work.  Like all 
unimplemented things,  it is the best there ever was.  ;-).

This stuff is so cheap, with lots of free development tools, but 
requiring expertise and dedication, it is clear you and your advisors 
have done your research (as it should be clear, so have I).

Your plan is excellent.  LETS GET ON WITH IT.  I am happy to write a lot 
of crap on all of this for our consumption if you will edit it.  I am 
just too harried and too sloppy to write decent prose now.  I will be 
happy to coauthor all of this into a working document with you.

Bob


Michelle wrote:
> This morning I had a quick meeting with the Baseband Underlord (Ken, no ham call - yet).
>
> He recommended a TI OMAP connected to Gemma through (if needed) a custom FPGA. 
>
> http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=2218&familyId=1525&paramCriteria=no
>
> Thoughts, suggestions, critique?
>
> Does anyone already have (or have familiarity with) a TI OMAP EVM? 
>
> More soon, -Michelle W5NYV 
>
>
> Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis. 
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-- 
(Co)Author: DttSP, Quiktrak, PowerSDR, GnuRadio 
Member: ARRL, AMSAT, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats,
NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC.
"It is human nature to think wisely and act in
an absurd fashion.", Anatole France.