Monday 24 March 2014

DVB-S running on the FPGA

Just a note to let you know that after many weeks of work I have finally
managed to get the DVB-S encoding moved into the FPGA. This offloads
about 60% of the processing from the host to the FPGA and will allow
me to use a Raspberry PI with Express.

I am hoping to have a demonstration transceiver based on the PI and Express
ready in time for CAT14 in September. The system will use MPEG4 video.
The video will be captured with the PI's webcam and the audio with a
Wolfson sound board. For receive I plan to use a USB DVB-S dongle.

In the process I will also provide a module to allow Express to be used
with the MK808 standalone system pioneered by Rob M0DTS.

I was going to post something about MyriadRF but I had a problem with
the batteries in my camera so that will have to wait until another day. 

5 comments:

  1. That is très impressive! I wish I could do more than an OR gate in VHDL :-)

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  2. Hello Henri, I am afraid I am still very much a novice at FPGAs. This has taken me about 1 month to get working. It uses about 33% of the FPGA. I think in the next project I do I will try and use Altera's Avalon fabric rather than just plain Verilog.

    - Charles

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  3. Hi Charles, Are aiming to do mpeg4 on s or s2?

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  4. No the FPGA is not big enough for DVB-S2 and MPEG4 would not fit either.
    However I am now looking at the Leopardboard http://beagleboard.org/leopard
    which will do both MPEG2 and MPEG4 encode/decode and will also take
    composite/component video in (with the right daughterboard). It also runs Linux
    I should have a board to evaluate next week. I have installed the development kit
    and have an SD image ready and waiting.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The Leopardboard came from Mouser (in case anyone wants one).

    ReplyDelete