Friday, October 22, 2010

SDR-Widget

I just preordered the BETA version of the upcoming SDR-Widget. This is basically a sound card designed by a group of radio amateurs specifcally to be used in Software Defined Radios based on the quadrature sampling detector scheme, i.e. a souncard is needed in opposite of the Digital Down Conversion scheme where an special ADC chip is doing the analog to digital conversion. I am excited about this and hope this will be a great success!


An early alpha version of the SDR-Widget

Hardware Features:
  • Compact 3" x 2.5", 2 board stack. 3.5mm audio connections.
  • Powered from the USB port, no external power supply needed
  • 24-bit AK5394A ADC - the premier audio ADC in commercial use today
  • CS4344 24-bit DAC
  • I2C control bus
  • 16-bit LCD panel interface (configured for 4-bit) with drivers for HD44780 based 4-line displays
  • Connector for quadrature rotary encoder input (with push switch)
  • 3 optocoupler buffered inputs
  • 3 mosfet 'contact' outputs
  • Firmware update via USB port
  • JTAG port (connector not mounted)
Software Features (either present or coming soon)
  • USB composite device with audio I/O, control and CDC channels
  • Supports USB Audio class 2 (480mbs) on the latest Linux kernel as well as the latest Mac OS
  • Support 24-bit 48k/96k/192k sample rates on Linux and MacOS
  • Support USB Audio class1 on Windows at 48k sample rate. NOTE: Windows does not support UAC2
  • Has an integrated CDC, Communications Device Class, channel for debug messages
  • A superset of the DG8SAQ control interface
  • 4-line LCD message engine
  • Menu system with selection control via external rotary encoder and switch.

Go here: http://groups.google.com/group/sdr-widget to get more details!