Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Re: A Humble Request.... - "Open-Hardware"

[J.D. Bakker]

[Moeller, please include some blank lines in the inline replies, as 
without those your mails are much harder to read]

At 00:11 +0100 10-01-2011, Moeller wrote:
> On 09.01.2011 22:34, Marcus D. Leech wrote:
>  > Sounds like you're volunteering to create such a project.  Let us 
> know when > you have everything set-up, including initial high-level 
> designs, and
> >  preliminary parts selections.  :-)
>
> No, but some people started (SSRP), really a good starting point...

The SSRP doesn't look too bad. Another option is the OpenHPSDR 
(http://openhpsdr.org/); I believe people are working on GNUradio 
drivers.

>  > But as an occasional small-scale hardware manufacturer myself (both in RF
>  > electronics and aerospace), I can tell you that simply looking at the raw
>  > BOM costs doesn't give you a good feel for how much it actually costs to
>  > produce/test/support real-world hardware.
>
> This is the commercial point of view. I compare this to the 
> Microsoft-approach. They need lots of money for producing, testing 
> and supporting operating systems and Office.

Don't take this the wrong way, but you're sounding like a theorist 
with zero experience in hardware design.

When I designed the LART (a decade-old software radio experimentation 
platform), it took me two revisions of the six-layer PCB prototype 
(at >$500 per revision) to get the board working. A few months later 
it turned out that the voltage regulator chips I'd used were suddenly 
impossible to get, so I had to do two more board re-spins. The proto 
boards were assembled at a professional facility for >$1000, until I 
got a reasonable yield soldering 0.5mm pitch LQFP packages myself 
(destroying several PCBs and $150 processor chips in the process). To 
test the boards I needed access to several tens of thousands of $ 
worth in logic analyzers, signal generators and spectrum analyzers. 
And then there was the global tantalum capacitor shortage...

Needless to say, none of this would have happened if I would have had 
to pay for it out of my own pocket. Luckily, this was a University 
project, and I managed to persuade the powers that be to allow me to 
release the design files.

Once again: software development and debugging is essentially free, 
with a 'make' of a new revision costing nothing but time (and some 
electricity). None of that is true for hardware development. Calling 
it the "Microsoft-approach" doesn't change any of that.

>  I think for $100-$300 you could build a good SDR with mass-market 
> chips (USRP uses quite common chips), affordable for students and 
> hobbyists, with certain trade-offs regarding maximum performance.

If you were talking software, I'd say "please post your patch".

I'm looking forward to reviewing your schematics and/or layout. If 
you want to do the work, I'll gladly assist. If you're trying to get 
other people to do the heavy lifting, I would respectfully ask you to 
grow up.

JD 'http://xkcd.com/386/' B.
--
LART. 250 MIPS under one Watt. Free hardware design files.
http://www.lartmaker.nl/