New toy!

The nice man from DHL arrived this morning bringing a new toy.
The toy which is at the top of the photo is a Terasic Highspeed AD/DA card
for my Altera starter kit. The board has a dual channel 65 Msps 14 bit A/D
and a dual channel 125 Msps 14 bit D/A. I ordered it on Friday and it came
first thing Tuesday morning all the way from Taiwan.

The Altera starter kit as well as having a reasonably large Cyclone II chip on it
has a USB interface, keyboard interface, VGA out, SD card, 24 bit Audio codec,
RS232 interface and a GPIO interface (which the AD/DA card plugs into) as
well as all of that it also has an EP2C20F484 FPGA, 8-Mbyte of SDRAM,
512K SRAM and 4-Mbytes of Flash memory. Plus loads of tutorials and
examples of how to use all these goodies.

I think you can see where I am going with all this! Looks pretty good as the
basis of a standalone SDR. I actually bought it to help me prototype an FPGA
DVB-S transmitter but more of that later.