Good evening all, I'd like to start a discussion about SDR/RF designs that try to avoid Mathworks or other for-a-price software.
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Have any readers had success implementing some form of RF design on the Zedboard using an analog devices transceiver?
Currently looking into utilizing Analog Devices drivers, either OS or Bare Metal.
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What started as a project to study RF and RFID has turned into a summer of studying SoCs, Xilinx tools, embedded systems, and the like. Not a bad deal, more unintentional. I've been meaning to post questions and update progress, however many questions are answered by reading and re-reading documentation. Other problems are avoided by some workaround or by moving in another direction.
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There is a vast amount of resources on the web: Zedboard's website, Xilinx, Analog Devices, Sven Andersson's blog, Digilent, Avnet, GNU radio, Wikipedia, asic-world, et cetera.
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These resources have great depth, but not a ton of breadth: an overview. I seemed to have missed the [free of cost] tutorial that explains to the novice digital systems engineer the world of Xilinx SoCs. What is PS, PL, AXI, MIO, IP cores, and how do they all glue together? What do I need to know to get started? These are questions I had answered through the documentation, but I felt was a low-speed albeit thorough way to get to where I am now. My group is working on the rough draft of a document we're calling "Zedboard + SDR: If I Knew Then What I Know Now," our attempt to provide such a summary.
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Background:
Group of senior-level student engineers (electrical and computer)
Software and systems programming (C, Java, bash, etc)
HDL programming (Verilog, VHDL)
Use of both microcontrollers and FPGAs
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Currently using the Zedboard + AD's FMCOMMS2
The group has regular access to (2) sets of boards, limited access to a 3rd.
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Accomplishments thus far:
Able to program FPGA-only (Switches, buttons, made a binary counter with LEDs)
Able to program PS-only (Hello World, interface through UART)
Able to communicate from PS to PL via GPIO (Sven Andersson's LED Dimmer, ours worked OK)
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Short term goals:
Be able to transmit at some frequency
Implement some form of modulation (On/off, ASK)
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Long term goals:
Understand RF theory better
Wireless communication between embedded systems
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Current path/direction:
Studying the boot process (booting from SD using files we have generated)
Utilizing the drivers from Analog Devices Github repository to transmit some frequency
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Any input appreciated!