7 Dec
2009
7 Dec
'09
9:20 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 7 Dec 2009 at 10:50, Jules Richardson wrote:
That sounds good. I think various calculations have been pretty much done to
death over the years, but do you anticipate 16MHz being enough, or are there
likely to be some things that it won't handle? (I kept all prior threads on
this kind of thing, but they're a bit lost amongst the noise right now!)
I like the fact it's RS232. Like you say, it'd be easy to add a converter to
give USB functionality, but a bit more difficult to go the other way.
Do you have any kind of estimate for when this
will be finished (to
the point of being releasable - sounds like there might be ongoing
firmware patches?). I'd be interested in buying one I think (even
though I try to avoid USB if I can).
Over at VC Forum, I've been working on a low-cost alternative using a
AVR (or pair of them) and the timer "capture" feature at a 16MHz
sample rate. One objective was to design something that anyone
could build, so the SMT (ATMega128) uC that I've been using is out. The output is essentially Catweasel-style sampling
That's good too, I think - I'm sure the way forward is to make the custom
hardware do the bare minimum, then allow the community to develop the tools to
do the more complex decoding/encoding work on regular PC hardware (which I
think is also Phil's approach)
Pricing should be very good--the Mega is <$6
Qantity 1; the Tiny is
about $1.50; the 128K SRAM is less than $5; other chips are pretty
much commodity items.
This is not to take away from Phil's fine work, but an attempt to
economically hit most of the common formats that a hobbyist is likely
to encounter with something that anyone who can solder can build.
Well, I assume tools can be made to translate between formats, in which case
it should matter little how many of these projects there are out there...
cheers
Jules