Hey! I'm Lukas, the guy who made this. Just discovered someone posted it on Hacker News, pretty exciting for me.
If you want to ask me any questions or make comments, I'm here and on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4uic5r/sdr_pla...
Just a quick note to say how impressive this project is, and that it was fun to read your detailed writeup. Thanks for sharing, it's inspiring and a neat bit of engineering on a lot of levels. I learn as much from mistakes (usually my own, but sometimes of others) so I'm glad you shared those, too.
One question: If you had to start over on this project, what would you do differently? (I am going to guess you would go straight for a six-layer board rather than 4 to simplify layout...)
Thanks! Actually, doing 4 layers first really helped me save cost on the first prototypes while still allowing me to verify almost the complete design.
But that's a difficult question. I think it's inevitable for some things to slip through like they did (the wrong valued resistors...) and 3 revisions to get it right were not that many.
One thing I'd certainly do is starting with the FPGA design early on, so I'd not just blindly pick a part that looked suitable like I did this time. That would have also eliminated the mistake where I didn't route clocks to clock capable pins.
Just a technical writing tip, when you are using any sort of acronym that's the subject of the piece it's helpful to do something like SDR (Software Defined Radio), then use SDR through the rest of the text. Either that or do the blog-style hyperlink the first acronym to the wikipedia page or give a footnote.
I second this! I understood that it would be something like that from the context, but I didn't knew what SDR meant until I read the comment above.
Great work!
I am blown away that someone your age can master all the expertise needed to implement this. This is very very non-trivial work indeed. At your age I could have put together some silly receiver/transmitter electronics based on schematics copied from an Elektor magazine. But this is mind blowing.
Wishing you the best. You have a great future ahead.
Very nice work. You're going to be faced with some interesting questions over the next few years, such as "WTF am I doing wasting time in this classroom?"
Thanks for posting details about your experience. I'm a software person learning about hw/FPGAs. These kinds of resources are invaluable!
P.s. it says you are a student. If you want to earn a side income giving virtual classes on PCB design, etc. you'd make a decent side income. Just an idea :p
Thanks for the link. I am interested in such a program but $29/mo for a hobby is too much at the moment. It would be great if there was a free community edition also.
However its good to know that there are options.
My primary concern with signing up for something like this, from a hobbyist perspective, is that these things add up and soon you will be bleeding money without generating any income to cover the expenses.
I was thinking 1 on 1 tutoring. There are already a lot of video resources out there. I wouldn't mind 30-50 bucks an hour for a consultation. Sort of like a fitness trainer for my electronics hobby.
