Weekly Report 1 Feb 2010 - 5 Feb 2010

Hello everyone!

We're putting two Rev B beagleboards together with Linksys routers (WRT54GLs running OpenWRT) and experimenting with that combination for mobile MEPs. This is 2.4 GHz instead of our desired 3.4/5.8GHz full duplex plan, but will allow for easier and cheaper development of the software on the TI OMAP. This is much closer to the HSMM model of MEP than the custom-hardware model of MEP. While some progress has been made on hardware, I'd like to experiment with a solution that is more off-the-shelf. For one thing, the cost is quite competitive. A WRT54GL is $60. A Beagleboard is #149. USB to Ethernet conversion cable ranges in price from $10 to $25, depending on speed.

USB is not the best interface for our application, but it is the interface available on a stock beagleboard. However, there is an improvement available. The BeagleBuddy Zippy Ethernet Combo Board is an $80 expansion board for the BeagleBoard that adds the following:

* Battery Backed RTC
* Second MMC slot
* 10BaseT Ethernet
* Second RS-232
* +5V level I2C
* AT24 EEPROM

This eliminates USB in the path to the router. We have one Zippy board here at the lab, currently used on a project to set up a spectrum survey for 70cm.

Revision 5 of the test code tutorial for the NEON processor was released, and this revision is a candidate for the final version of the document. It can be found here:
http://www.delmarnorth.com/microwave/requirements/testcodetutorial_neon-test_draft5.pdf

It's also in the RSS feed, so it will automagically appear in your feed reader if you have subscribed to the project feed.

Next step is to add NEON support to Fastest Fourier Tranform in the West library. This project will improve signal processing on the beagleboard.

For further reading and reference, here are some web pages for the devices and software mentioned today.

Fastest Fourier Tranform in the West: http://www.fftw.org/

BeagleBuddy Zippy: http://www.tincantools.com/product.php?productid=16147&cat=249&page=1

Beagleboard Home Page: http://beagleboard.org/

WRT54GL router: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#WRT54GL

OpenWRT: http://www.openwrt.org/

More soon,
-Michelle W5NYV