Red Pitaya * Rasbperry Pi
This story begins with finding out about the Red Pitaya – and starting down the road of bringing into being one of my long held dreams as an amateur radio operator (KA6S by the way). I’ve always wanted to build a complete transceiver. Not just a kit, but something that I understood from the ground up. Something I KNEW I could fix! This has been a long time coming considering that I’ve been at this since 1974!
To start from the beginning I’ve been enthralled with the High Performance Software Defined Radio (HPSDR) project since its relatively early days. I purchased each of their product boards as they came out. I even worked a little on the project doing some verilog work (my day job) but for various reasons I stood back from that effort and let others proceed.
I gathered together the requisite pieces (taking about 5 years) and put together a system. It works! However – it isn’t the top of the heap anymore! The implementers of the HPSDR project found out that they started too small, i.e. the “platform” they constructed on a bus had multiple major deficits. The bus speeds were limited, the original FPGAs were to small. That begat Hermes – a single board implementation that had plenty of room for future enhancements.
The biggest problem I had with the original HPSDR platform besides being end-of-the-road feature wise, is that it didn’t have a front console – something I didn’t have a solution for either. The answer to that came in the middle of the project.
Enter Red Pitaya and the HPSDR variant provided by Pavel Demin.
Link to red-pitaya-notes/hpsdr site
After MUCH looking around and reading, the block diagram below is what I set out to construct.
I didn’t have all the pieces of this block diagram in mind initially – but this is what took form over the next half year.