Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] USRP for physics project

[Ian Buckley]

Regardless of whether you use the stock FPGA design or a custom one to do raw 
data capture you are going to run up against the basic limits of 1GB/s 
i.e 1Gb/S = 125MB/S = 62.5M 16bit samples/S

The stock image is always going to want to send an I and Q channel, and has the 
option of either 25MSamples/S @ 16bit or 50MSample/S @ 8bits and it's going to 
pass the data through either 1 or 2 low pass FIR filters to decimate to that 
data rate.
Even if you write a very custom FPGA design that packs 14bit data efficiently 
and uses a raw UDP transport, you would be doing well to  achieve 70MSample 
@14bits over ethernet since real world performance never quite matches 
theoretical.

Interesting project though, the USRP could definitely be a useful generalized 
scientific data capture device.
-ian

On Jun 22, 2013, at 8:11 PM, address@hidden wrote:

> I'm looking at using USRPs for data acquisition in a physics project using an 
> LFRX.
> Rather than for more typical SDR applications. I'd be interested in hearing 
> from
> anyone who's done this.
> 
> At first however I was wondering if this application sounds feasible, is it 
> crazy to
> use the USRP for non-SDR applications? Are their other better suited devices?
> 
> I'd like to use it to replace this product: 
> http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/209713
> And possibly eventually integrate into our own PCB, I guess the n200 is still 
> mostly open hard/software?
> 
> So real rather than IQ data I guess. I'd like to samples at 100MS/s 14bit, 
> and stream it
> over the network, would this require changing the FPGA code?
> 
> I've pinged a few people off list, so apologies if this is a duplicate, I'll 
> post here
> if I receive a reply.
> 
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