bladeRF (DATV Maybe?)

[G4GUO]

I had this interesting project pointed out to me

http://www.nuand.com/bladeRF
It would be fully capable of transmitting and receiving DATV (unlike a lot of SDRs).
What is interesting is the highly integrated RF chip it uses.
http://www.limemicro.com/lms6002d.php

- Charles G4GUO

[M0DTS]

yes looks very interesting, hope something comes of it... down to those software/digital people again to sort it out for us though

I've dusted my beagleboard off here and going to have a play now u inspired me with the SABRE Lite...hi

Rob

[G4GUO]

Yes great stuff Rob,

The more the merrier, we will turn you all into softies eventually you know!
I am currently trying to set up an ARM development environment so I can have a
go writing my own apps for it. My Linux code for the DATV-Express should port
to the ARM environment as I have not done anything too clever but I am going to
have to be careful about memory usage.

I am waiting for Freescale to release the GStreamer hardware codec plugins
to the general public so I can do some video on the Sabre board.
There is some legal reason holding that up at the moment according to the
Linaro website.

There is a demo which comes with the Sabre Lite board showing the CPU load for decoding
720P H.264, without H/W acceleration it uses almost 100% of one core but with H/W
acceleration that drops to around 5% on one of the four cores.

The bladeRF RF chip is quite amazing but at $110 each in small quantities it is a bit pricey.

- Charles GUO

[M0DTS]

Great with the HD Decode on the Sable Lite, very low cpu usage, full duplex would be possible on the same board.

Have the beagleboard fired up here with my old opencaster scripts but it can barely generate a TS from pvrUSB2 in real time never mind send it down the usb port.
I'm sure there could be lots of optimizing done in the code... at least i can say i tried to find out ...hi

Rob

[G4GUO]

Hi Rob, well it was worth trying!
I downloaded the latest version of Linux for the Rasp Pi I bought
and plugged my PVR-1900 into it. There was no recognition of the
device at all. There were only about 12 GStreamer objects present
after I installed GStreamer. The Sabre has about 100 objects and a
regular install of Ubuntu 117 plugins and 490 features. I guess these
things will come with time.

The Sabre Lite did recognise the PVR but would not create a V4L device
for it. I noticed that the default Linaro Linux has firmware for earlier
PVRs, so I added the firmware for the 1900 still no joy but at least it looks
as if someone is looking at the problem.
The Sabre did recognise it's two camera interfaces video16 and video17.
I have not tried sticking a DVB-S dongle into it yet.

I guess I am probably going to have to make a custom build of the Kernel
to add the support I need. I emailed the Freescale landing team to see
when the accelerated codecs will be available to us mere mortals.

- Charles

[G4GUO]

Rob,
I have managed to get a bit further with the RPI.
I copied the firmware file for my HVR-1900 into /lib/firmware
and now the PI is recognising my Hauppauge PVR and
creating /dev/video0, when I try to view the stream using VLC
it crashes so I am now waiting for an MPEG2 licence to arrive
from the foundation, hopefully that is why it is crashing.

At the other end I have managed to compile my Express loader
code on the RPI board and can now download the FX2 and FPGA
firmware to the DATV-Express board (the leds flash indicating the
FPGA code is correctly running).

So far so good.

- Charles G4GUO

[M0DTS]

That is good news.
I've only tried the PVR-USB2 capture source on the V3.? kernel on my beagleboard but it picked it up fine.
The previous v2.4 kernel did not want to play ball and I'm not familiar enough with building kernels yet so just installed a newer image to the sd card!.

i figured out that my beagleboard xM runs at 800MHz after some digging so not quite 1GHz that is is capable of.. i read this is related to the kernel/Linux version but not sure.

Anyway the opencaster route is probably a bit dated now and new things will appear on the horizon...

Rob

[G4GUO]

Hi Rob,

The MPEG2 licence did not fix the problem however it also crashes on
a PC install of Linux so I guess I am trying to do something that is not
permitted!

I am planning to try using GStreamer which is similar in concept to
Microsoft Direct Show. I will probably have to write an object to
multiplex the SI tables. First I have to get DATV-Express out the door.

I noticed you can buy things like a MK808 on eBay for £30 from China.
It has a 1.6 GHz dual core A9 ARM CPU, 1 G of memory and a graphics
accelerator. I am sure something like that could easily be hacked
to make a pretty neat DATV friendly portable device. It actually
looks better value for money than a Rasp PI. I will have to do a Google
and see how hackable it is and what the quad core Mali-400 GPU is capable of.
I have seen some YouTube reviews of it and it looks pretty good.

A bit more research shows that the Mali-400 is an ARM designed
coprocessor used to accelerate various codec operations so it depends
on what software is loaded into it as to what it can do.

There is a port of Ubuntu for the MK808, so you can either run that
or Android which comes with it. The MK808 only seems to have H.264
decoding supplied in the firmware. It may well be the ARM version of
FFTW makes use of the Mali-400 to accelerate it's operations I
don't know.

- Charles G4GUO

[M0DTS]

I've never used gstreamer before as it had no use for our DVB activities but did look very modular, so as you say can have the DVB bit added as required.

Fine on the MK808 devices, they look very interesting...
Terry G1LPS has mentioned to me before about them but i had not looked any further into it as there were not many others making ports to linux for them when i checked.
It now seems like there is more support for that so it maybe worthwhile getting one to try out...hmmm!

They maybe useful as a stream sever box for batc too.

Rob

[G4GUO]

GStreamer looks very attractive for a number of reasons

1) It runs on multiple platforms (Linux,Window,MAC).
2) It can be used on a command line or embedded in an application.
3) Freescale's codecs, capture and display devices are supplied as GStreamer objects
as I expect are other manufacturers.

As I already have the code to add the DVB stuff (it is needed for my
current software), I should be able to turn it into a GStreamer object fairly quickly.

Having started to look there are an awful lot of cheap Chinese "stick TV PCs"
and a lot of people hacking them. The only issue I can see with something like
the MK808 is the lack of a camera interface. that means it really needs compressed
video over the USB2 to leave enough BW for Digilite or DATV-Express to hang off the
same USB2 connection. So either a fancy Logitech MP4 camera or a good old
Hauppauge USB2 would be needed (why couldn't Hauppauge make their devices run off
5 volts!).

As far as BATC streamer is concerned there is a GStreamer plugin that supports
Adobe's RTMP protocol and you can buy USB2 to ethernet adapters so I think
your idea should fly.

- Charles