Draft Presentation for SDR Forum at Dayton 2009

Draft presentation for the SDR Forum at Dayton 2009. Slides + notes. Not everything in the presentation will be on the screen, but the presentation (drafts and final version) will include complete notes.

Tuesday Challenge Summary

Tuesday Challenge for 14 April 2009 was:

I'm interested in reasons *not* to select Android as a baseline OS for MEP stations.
Here are a few more details:

Android is an open‐source operating system primarily intended for cellular phones.
www.android.com

Android scales to systems like MEP, third party development is encouraged, it's supported by a consortium of all sorts of people we've heard of (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/), and it uses lots of linux‐like process protection protocols that would seem to enhance stability and usefulness. People seem interested in developing for Android, and it might help MEP greatly to go in this direction. What do you all think?

I have an image for the TI OMAP from the Embedded Systems Conference, and would love to hear from anyone else pro or con on Android.

Philip Balister, Assi Friedman, Eric Fort, Bob McGwier, Paul Williamson, Roger Thompson, Ken Easton and Frank Brickle contributed to the discussion of the consideration of Android for MEP.

Thank you to all the participants in and followers of the discussion so far.

The consensus was a well‐reasoned preference for embedded linux over Android, primarily due to the insular nature of Android (Android is based on linux but it is not linux) and also due to the fact that it is at this time an unproven platform that may not be as flexible as we need for MEP.

The potential advantages of Android are significant, and space will be made in the software section of the page for anyone that would like to branch off and pursue Android for MEP. However, the primary effort will be in the direction of embedded linux. Both Moblin (mobile linux http://moblin.org/) and QtExtended (http://qtopia.net/modules/devices/) were recommended for consideration.

‐Michelle W5NYV

Weekly Report 1 May 2009

Greetings everyone! Here's a brief report for the past week or so. 

1) Development Image News: While we didn't get the MEP-flavor Moblin development image finalized - the development tools are sitting on the desktop waiting for installation -  we did complete the task of growing the virtual disk to a larger and more useful size (from 2GB to 8GB). 

The development image (Moblin V2) can be run in a virtual machine to develop Moblin applications.  What you do is work within the "guest" operating system of Moblin, while running whatever operating system you prefer as the host. More details about Moblin can be found at www.moblin.org. 


2) I have a set of ideas that need to get organized into a presentation for Dayton. 

First, I'm planning to present the work from uWSDR (the transmit modulator project organized by Grant Hodgson. I will endeavor to do the work of his team justice in the talk. 

The second thing I want to communicate is ideas shared with and by Frank Brickle, about the status of microwave SDR in general as the "place we want to go", and how MEP incorporates modern communications models. I would very much like to show performance comparisons between the traditional transverter approach and currently-designed or currently-buildable SDRs in bands specific to our project. 


Third, I will appeal for volunteers to help get more of the project into more active development. 

I'm aiming to have a draft of these ideas published over the weekend, and am very much interested in feedback and ideas for this presentation.

3) I started work on a software specification for the discovery function. The reason I picked this one is because I believe I understand how to describe it, I'm confident that it's a reasonable starting point for software design participation, and it provides a way to experiment with different interpretations of what the MEP user interfaceshould be. 

More soon, -Michelle W5NYV