SDR-Widget arrived

The SDR-Widget that I wrote about some months ago arrived today. I just unpacked and here is a few pictures:

I am really looking forward getting into this. The little problem I got is that I do not have any Softrock SDR to use it with right now. So it will be used as a normal sound card for a few days.

But I actually have both the Softrock Lite II and Softrock RXTX 6.3 here to be built. They have been in my drawer now for more than half a year but some days ago I started building again on the lite for 30m and no problems so far. I even managed to solder the SOIC chips ! I have been using the QS1R receiver that is some what more expensive SDR than these for some years now, but I really looking forward to use a radio that I have built myself and using only open source software !

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!