As usual, "taking over the scrolling" causes issues - in this case, the page is difficult to access using Firefox for Android. I usually can't get to the information at the bottom of the page (it worked once, don't know how)
HumanOstrich
Ah, I didn't realize there was more content if I keep scrolling in an unnatural way. Thank you.
zbrozek
I gave up trying to read the page for these reasons.
cedivadOP
Is this with an older Firefox version maybe? I've tried with a relatively recent one and couldn't reproduce, but I'll look at the logs and try to fix this now that the HN storm has passed :-)
ajb
It seems to work a bit better now but it looks like it isn't working as the page stops when it goes into a transition.
There's a writers maxim, "murder your darlings". what they mean is that a work often has some styling, phrases, exposition, even whole characters or subplots that the writer has worked hard on and become attached to, but that detract from the work as a whole. So they have to be removed. I think this may be a darling unfortunately.
cedivadOP
Strange. I haven't changed a thing. Just to confirm, the problem yesterday was that the website would be stuck, not that you couldn't move down further by scrolling in an unnatural way, right?
ajb
I thought so but don't seem to be able to reproduce it now.
ptero
As a data point (another aFF on Android) I could scroll down, but the experience is painful. I am interested in SDRs and have a bunch of HackFRs and dongles, but the page was very off-putting. I suspect most tinkerers that would be interested in this hardware would love an option to see all this on a static web page.
zbrozek
Firefox mobile on Android 111.1.0
I abandon all sites that override scroll because they're too frustrating to read.
cedivadOP
I designed this system (not the chip, clearly), so feel free to ask any questions!
kam
What's the software story for the VSPA DSP? Is that going to run user code, or a binary blob that does some filtering and sends I/Q samples to the iMX or USB3?
NXP doesn't share many details on the LA9310. Could just be too early, but it smells like a "you must convince a sales rep you're going to be a qualified customer and sign a stack of NDAs before you dare ask for a datasheet or instruction set manual" situation, which is unfortunate.
cedivadOP
NXP are open sourcing a lot of the support stack for the LA9310 to go along with this product release, but I'm afraid they consider the VSPA DSP to be highly proprietary, yes.
Seeing the spec I thought there is a Zynq but iMX6 looks even better. Can I get this board as an individual hobbyist instead of a company?
cedivadOP
*i.MX 8M Plus, please :-) The 8M Plus is not that different from the RPi4!
Yes, of course, this will be sold to anybody and be very, very competitive, like in the order of ~$550 including the Granita board ($100 less for GranitaLite).
gaudat
I stand corrected. IMX 8M plus. 550 that is a nice price compared to say LimeSDR. I will be sure to grab one when its available.
112233
Can this device work as a medium/short wave receiver? How low can the frequency go? Like, if one has this device, would it also replace something like RSPdx?
What is the compatibility with existing SDR software?
It mentions multiple ADCs, can it work as a coherent receiver, similar to kraken?
cedivadOP
The Granita board should already work down to 10 MHz. If you need to go lower, I (or someone else) would need to design a custom RFNM daughterboard for low frequencies. You could do direct conversion up to 150 MHz, so it should be a simple task and come with good performances.
All existing SDR software should be supported via OsmoSDR.
Yes, it should work as a coherent receiver. There are some questions about unmatched I/Q pair trace lengths, but from what I heard from the experts as long as the clock is coherent (which it is), we should be able to correct those in software.
zokier
> If you need to go lower, I (or someone else) would need to design a custom RFNM daughterboard for low frequencies. You could do direct conversion up to 150 MHz, so it should be a simple task and come with good performances.
If do ship oscilloscope daughterboard that you have on your site, would that work also as SW radio?
cedivadOP
You'd probably want something way more sensitive than that, right? Something that goes well into the micro/nanovolts rather than millivolts. But it should be reasonably simple to do. Also the RTL board when designed with a good frontend should be a viable option.
You need to work directly with NXP. Our first big batch will be here in September. We could have had them earlier but there are plenty of different moving parts, things to do and software to write, so September is a good compromise.
But yes, the long lead time is the reason for the waitlist!
plugger
If you can provide a board to Alan, the lead dev of SatDump (https://github.com/SatDump/SatDump) to ensure compatability I'll 100% buy this board.
cedivadOP
We should have a fair number of boards going around in a couple of months (10-20), when the first batch is done and basic software is complete. Mostly as loaners at first as there will be more requests than boards, but everyone that contributes should definitely get one from the first mass-production batch :-)
plugger
Fantastic news. SatDump and SDR++ compatibility would be sweet
MegaDeKay
Will this be open source hardware / software like the HackRF One?? I see no mention of this so I assume not?
cedivadOP
The schematics will be released publicly when the product is shipping, but it won't be OSHW. I don't want to end up like the HackRF, where one small company is burdened with supporting an ecosystem of what is mostly clones. The HackRF designer himself said he wouldn't do it again.
ChuckNorris89
The board layout triggers my OCD :)
Why the weird angle of those main ICs?
Usually it's 45 degrees or parallel to the board.
cedivadOP
I routed the i.MX block like a normal human being, then rotated everything 23 degrees to (1) avoid the fiber weave effect and (2) not collide with any of the mounting holes, as that placement needs to be symmetrical under the slots for the two daughterboards.
I get that it's triggering people, I get PTSD thinking about needing to touch that routing as well. Altium doesn't support arbitrary-angle differential pairs, so this was a huge mess. Next time I should just ask the PCB manufacturer to rotate the fiberglass sheets by a few degrees instead.
joezydeco
I love the curvy traces! It gives me the warm feels about old school handmade rubylith films. Don't change a thing!
gaudat
Things that are placed non orthogonally is a sign of high speed black magic to me.
Edit: the other thread shows me writing a reply at 2am this morning... Pretty sure I didn't dream walk just to post on HN...
eqvinox
Any chance to get a direct PCIe connection to plug this into an x86 host?
cedivadOP
It would need to be a different design entirely.
fadedsignal
It is really cool. I have some questions.
> There are two embedded antennas to ensure that we can always correct any internal frequency drift by syncing to the cell network.
What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it?
Aside from that,
- What is the compatibility with open source LTE, 5G solutions(SRS, OAI, etc.)?
- I couldn't see PPS input. Are you planning to add it with daughterboards?
cedivadOP
PPS input/output is off to the side, look for the "User Interface Connector" paragraph on the website.
> What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it?
You can quickly pause whatever is running on the LA9310, push the NXP NLM stack, correct local frequency errors by synching to a cell network tower and then resume normal operation. It's going to cause a glitch, but if you want to maintain frequency accuracy it's a small cost you need to pay. Once you have absolute deviation and drift it should track quite well.
My understanding is that SRS and the like all require beefy desktop-class processors to run in?
fadedsignal
> My understanding is that SRS and the like all require beefy desktop-class processors to run in?
Yes. You can ignore this question. I should have asked you the driver first. I think you replied that question already on another comment. Thx for your explanation. Looking forward to seeing it in the market soon.
drmpeg
Sorry, u.fl connectors are horrible and I'll never buy a product that uses them.
cedivadOP
I don't like them either, but I couldn't find a better way to provide the clock in/out feature and still fit in that area of the board. The optional OCXO on the opposite side of the U.FL connectors doesn't help (can't do edge-launch mmcx, for example), and if you move down you would ruin the legend for the user interface connector.
But fair feedback, noted. I can't move the optional OCXO below the enclosure, as that would be taller than the aluminium block itself and require a slot breaking the RF shielding, but maybe I can move the connectors. I'll try and get creative.
I can't stand the amount of fragile connectors people keep installing on expensive boards. My BladeRF's micro USB 3.0 sheared off.
USB-C is even a bit contentious for me. USB-A with the 3.0 extensions is much more durable.
IYasha
Yeah, USB-A/B are the best, where applicable.
drmpeg
I wouldn't change things on my account. I certainly understand the density advantage to u.fl connectors. They just grind my gears.
Best of luck with the project. I couldn't find anything on "Granita". Is it called "SnowWings" now?
cedivadOP
No, I think your feedback is fair, MMCX connectors are certainly more durable. Maybe the tradeoff there is that they are not as common, so I might need to include adapters as well. I would like to have them on the opposite side of the board, so that we can maybe enclose them with the CNC enclosure which would make it truly pull resistant.
The Granita is technically unreleased, the manufacturer has been making changes to the packaging of the chip as recently as a couple of months ago. It's based on the same silicon as the IceWings: https://arcticsemiconductor.com/icewings/
mschuster91
Where's the problem? Place the board into a housing, you want to do that anyway for shielding and to prevent random crap on your desk from damaging the board, and use u.fl to whatever socket type you prefer adapters.
(1) The AFE7903 wouldn't allow for any modularity in the system (look at what we are calling the RFNM interface on the website, I think that's the real reason this platform will work),
(2) Pricing, that single chip would cost in quantity 1k more than our current BOM, and you still need to add FPGAs, frontend, etc. next to it.
(3) Those single chip frontend modules don't have the embedded DSP cores we can use to do things like processing FFTs in real time and feeding them to a browser with no computing on the host, which I think will be very cool (multiple 160 MHz FFTs with a gr-phosphor like visualisation I think has never been done before at this price point).
vodou
Just trying to get my head around SDR.
What are some examples of practical use cases for a platform like this?
What are the benefits of this SDR platform compared to other solutions?
cedivadOP
A few practical use cases that are not easily covered by similar platforms:
1) Direction finding thanks to the 8x 153 MSPS ADCs and coherent clocks.
2) Mixed domain analyzer: have one daughterboard act as a RF receiver, and at the same time sample an analogue voltage with the other one. This is a capability reserved to the most expensive of test equipment and lets you analyze how a RF switch is behaving (or do side channel attacks?).
3) Sample almost 600 MHz of bandwidth in real time, use the powerful DSP core to run FFTs on it and send the results over to a browser that implements a RTSA display. This lets you have a real-time view of the spectrum around you for just a few watts. Thanks to the double-PPLs on the Granita board, you can also sweep the spectrum very fast.
4) There is enough processing power onboard to enable RFNM as a 5G RedCap node. We are working with NXP to add an eSIM, so with the right software, this can become a fully-functional 5G UE and connect to the normal cell network. Don't care about 5G? You can write your own standard and deploy it on the same hardware (the limitation here is having access to NXP's DSP development tools, which might limit the processing to the beefy i.MX 8M Plus, but some cores will be available as binaries).
5) Technically, anything requiring an insane amount of ADCs and DACs. You can implement your own board, as the heavy lifting (the motherboard) is already done for you. You could prototype something easily with the development board that's on the website and turn it into a real design within weeks.
syedkarim
Does this offer 4x RX and 4 TX channels? Or is it 8x RX channels? Is each individual channel capable of MSPS?
cedivadOP
8x ADCs and 2x ADCs @ 153 MSPS -> 4x RX I/Q pairs and 1x TX I/Q pair. The way the math works, you can sample a 153 MHz signal at 153 MSPS using I/Q, or you can use each ADC line to sample at nyquist, and in that case you get 8x RF channels, each sampling 80 MHz at most. All untested, of course.
syedkarim
Once Arctic Semi puts the Granita into normal commercial production, what do you guess the 1ku pricing to be?
syedkarim
Typo: Is each RX channel capable of 153 MSPS?
cushychicken
Tons of applications and uses in electronic warfare and electronic intelligence gathering.
Also forms a lot of the basis of RADAR, though that's a separate use case.
To oversimplify: SDR allows you to build a radio based around math instead of complex electronics - or, at least fewer complex electronics. It sacrifices a bit of performance but confers a lot of the advantages you get in other software systems - updates, reconfigurability, etc.
ajb
Many radio systems are already SDR, just closed. The benefits are the same as building anything into software rather than hardware: you can update it later, support more variations, etc. The downside is more power consumption, so cellphone radios are not usually completely SDR (not an expert on those so correct me if I'm wrong)
armcat
This site has some great examples on what various inexpensive SDR hardware can be used for: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/. Use cases range from receiving weather satellite imagery, to reverse engineering radio protocols (e.g. for remote door openers). Several years ago I used an inexpensive DVB USB dongle containing the RTL2832U chip (which enables SDR), to sniff 2G/GSM broadcast packets.
jareklupinski
compared to other radio solutions, being able to do more digital analysis on the raw signal lets you do cool things that were previously impossible
at one place, we replaced entire banks of traditional radio scanners using a single SDR
a scanner could only dial into one frequency at a time, but an SDR let us capture entire swathes of the frequency spectrum and extract concurrent streams from multiple sources simultaneously
I'd love to sit down with my Lime and end-to-end my own cell base station... one day
ejolto
Very cool PCB routing, I wonder what tool they use to get those smooth organic looking traces.
qwezxcrty
Cool, how much is it?
cedivadOP
I can't commit to pricing before I have decided on a partner for the distribution (DIY vs Kickstarter vs Crowdsupply, they all come with different costs and tradeoffs), but $550 is my target retail price for the Motherboard + Granita + Dev Board + CNC enclosure combo. $450 if you are happy with the Granita Lite board. Everything will be sold separately.
As a comparison, $550 would be 10x to 20x less expensive than what's on the market today for similar bandwidth specs (Aaronia Spectran V6 and Ettus USRP).
themehdi
This is amazing! I would buy one in this price range.
What sort of help/contributions you need/expect from interested users? E.g. financial funding on CrowdSupply, beta testing, feature wishlist, etc.
cedivadOP
We need volumes, so the best I can hope for is people join the waitlist and pre-order when we show a functioning prototype. We already placed sizeable orders with the manufacturers and have the first batch planned for September, but further batches are probably going to be delayed into 2024 (we can't start asking for preorders before the product is tested, which is going to take time, so we can't preorder those chips early like we did for the first batch).
Feature wishlist: please! Do send them our way. Especially if it's hardware, this is the right time!
themehdi
Thanks. I have followed you on Twitter, and will discuss this with my RF fellas and get back to you on Discord or email.
However, for now, I could mention 2 things that can be attractive to me as a radio amateur and RF hobbyist:
1. Any daughter board that can provide HF coverage, ideally with a few filters for the ham bands.
2. A proper shielding enclosure (shield from external noise, plus provide some heat dissipation)
and 3rd would be on the software side: support in Soapy and GNURadio (osmosdr) but I guess that would eventually come from the community.
This is exciting, and as supporter of previous open source SDR projects, I'm looking forward to more updates and news from you.
cedivadOP
:-) The HF daughterboard is the only thing that's missing, I think. To be honest, I was hoping for someone to suggest a nice design on that front.
There's a writers maxim, "murder your darlings". what they mean is that a work often has some styling, phrases, exposition, even whole characters or subplots that the writer has worked hard on and become attached to, but that detract from the work as a whole. So they have to be removed. I think this may be a darling unfortunately.
I abandon all sites that override scroll because they're too frustrating to read.
NXP doesn't share many details on the LA9310. Could just be too early, but it smells like a "you must convince a sales rep you're going to be a qualified customer and sign a stack of NDAs before you dare ask for a datasheet or instruction set manual" situation, which is unfortunate.
Example: https://github.com/nxp-qoriq?q=la93
Yes, of course, this will be sold to anybody and be very, very competitive, like in the order of ~$550 including the Granita board ($100 less for GranitaLite).
What is the compatibility with existing SDR software?
It mentions multiple ADCs, can it work as a coherent receiver, similar to kraken?
All existing SDR software should be supported via OsmoSDR.
Yes, it should work as a coherent receiver. There are some questions about unmatched I/Q pair trace lengths, but from what I heard from the experts as long as the clock is coherent (which it is), we should be able to correct those in software.
If do ship oscilloscope daughterboard that you have on your site, would that work also as SW radio?
But yes, the long lead time is the reason for the waitlist!
Why the weird angle of those main ICs?
Usually it's 45 degrees or parallel to the board.
I get that it's triggering people, I get PTSD thinking about needing to touch that routing as well. Altium doesn't support arbitrary-angle differential pairs, so this was a huge mess. Next time I should just ask the PCB manufacturer to rotate the fiberglass sheets by a few degrees instead.
Edit: the other thread shows me writing a reply at 2am this morning... Pretty sure I didn't dream walk just to post on HN...
> There are two embedded antennas to ensure that we can always correct any internal frequency drift by syncing to the cell network.
What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it?
Aside from that,
- What is the compatibility with open source LTE, 5G solutions(SRS, OAI, etc.)?
- I couldn't see PPS input. Are you planning to add it with daughterboards?
> What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it?
You can quickly pause whatever is running on the LA9310, push the NXP NLM stack, correct local frequency errors by synching to a cell network tower and then resume normal operation. It's going to cause a glitch, but if you want to maintain frequency accuracy it's a small cost you need to pay. Once you have absolute deviation and drift it should track quite well.
My understanding is that SRS and the like all require beefy desktop-class processors to run in?
Yes. You can ignore this question. I should have asked you the driver first. I think you replied that question already on another comment. Thx for your explanation. Looking forward to seeing it in the market soon.
But fair feedback, noted. I can't move the optional OCXO below the enclosure, as that would be taller than the aluminium block itself and require a slot breaking the RF shielding, but maybe I can move the connectors. I'll try and get creative.
Edit, surface-mount MMCX to the rescue? https://i.imgur.com/1GJhJa6.png
I can't stand the amount of fragile connectors people keep installing on expensive boards. My BladeRF's micro USB 3.0 sheared off.
USB-C is even a bit contentious for me. USB-A with the 3.0 extensions is much more durable.
Best of luck with the project. I couldn't find anything on "Granita". Is it called "SnowWings" now?
The Granita is technically unreleased, the manufacturer has been making changes to the packaging of the chip as recently as a couple of months ago. It's based on the same silicon as the IceWings: https://arcticsemiconductor.com/icewings/
The idea is however you get shielding and cooling, sit it on the desk upside down and have all the RFNM boards accessible from the top.
(1) The AFE7903 wouldn't allow for any modularity in the system (look at what we are calling the RFNM interface on the website, I think that's the real reason this platform will work),
(2) Pricing, that single chip would cost in quantity 1k more than our current BOM, and you still need to add FPGAs, frontend, etc. next to it.
(3) Those single chip frontend modules don't have the embedded DSP cores we can use to do things like processing FFTs in real time and feeding them to a browser with no computing on the host, which I think will be very cool (multiple 160 MHz FFTs with a gr-phosphor like visualisation I think has never been done before at this price point).
What are some examples of practical use cases for a platform like this? What are the benefits of this SDR platform compared to other solutions?
1) Direction finding thanks to the 8x 153 MSPS ADCs and coherent clocks.
2) Mixed domain analyzer: have one daughterboard act as a RF receiver, and at the same time sample an analogue voltage with the other one. This is a capability reserved to the most expensive of test equipment and lets you analyze how a RF switch is behaving (or do side channel attacks?).
3) Sample almost 600 MHz of bandwidth in real time, use the powerful DSP core to run FFTs on it and send the results over to a browser that implements a RTSA display. This lets you have a real-time view of the spectrum around you for just a few watts. Thanks to the double-PPLs on the Granita board, you can also sweep the spectrum very fast.
4) There is enough processing power onboard to enable RFNM as a 5G RedCap node. We are working with NXP to add an eSIM, so with the right software, this can become a fully-functional 5G UE and connect to the normal cell network. Don't care about 5G? You can write your own standard and deploy it on the same hardware (the limitation here is having access to NXP's DSP development tools, which might limit the processing to the beefy i.MX 8M Plus, but some cores will be available as binaries).
5) Technically, anything requiring an insane amount of ADCs and DACs. You can implement your own board, as the heavy lifting (the motherboard) is already done for you. You could prototype something easily with the development board that's on the website and turn it into a real design within weeks.
Also forms a lot of the basis of RADAR, though that's a separate use case.
To oversimplify: SDR allows you to build a radio based around math instead of complex electronics - or, at least fewer complex electronics. It sacrifices a bit of performance but confers a lot of the advantages you get in other software systems - updates, reconfigurability, etc.
at one place, we replaced entire banks of traditional radio scanners using a single SDR
a scanner could only dial into one frequency at a time, but an SDR let us capture entire swathes of the frequency spectrum and extract concurrent streams from multiple sources simultaneously
I'd love to sit down with my Lime and end-to-end my own cell base station... one day
As a comparison, $550 would be 10x to 20x less expensive than what's on the market today for similar bandwidth specs (Aaronia Spectran V6 and Ettus USRP).
Feature wishlist: please! Do send them our way. Especially if it's hardware, this is the right time!
and 3rd would be on the software side: support in Soapy and GNURadio (osmosdr) but I guess that would eventually come from the community.
This is exciting, and as supporter of previous open source SDR projects, I'm looking forward to more updates and news from you.
Here is a render of the enclosure (work in progress): https://i.imgur.com/AEYgLxU.png
And of course we agree on the software side! Soapy + GNURadio are a must. Hopefully my driver-writing skills are up to the challenge!