Chicken or egg?

DrTeeth

I am just asking something here for general information.

When designing a rig like those in the 6000 series, does one design the hardware and decide what features to add later or does one start designing after one has a feature list?

I cannot see how one can do the former as there seems to be no end to the features that can be added. Regarding the latter, it would be too limiting as unthought of features could not be added later.

I am just interested in the general design process.

TIA

W4YXU

I don't know how relevant this is but I did a club program on FPGA's (Field programmable gate arrays) and the subtitle was " Build it then design it!"

Jim
W4YXU

DrTeeth

That does sound interesting. Do you have any info I can look at?

W4YXU

The program was about 5 years ago and the project about 10.  I will try to find the presentation file... But I am a pack-rat with data as well as stuff!

I would suggest the Altera website as I used their components since the development software was FREE!

http://www.altera.com/

Jim
W4YXU

DrTeeth

Thanks for trying to find the file. I find things like this interesting even though I know next to nothing about them.

OT: Similarly, mass production fascinatingly magical. Yes, I am subscribed to the appropriate YouTube channels ;-).

Have a great weekend.

Bill -VA3WTB

Wow great question Guy. At Flex there are two camps that work close together. The software guys and the hardware guys and guys that can work with both.

I would imagine several meetings. they would talk about a new radio. But this won't be just any radio this would be something completley new to ham radio. And it needs to be able to do this and that.

So what kind of hardware can we put together to make this happen?
The hardware guys would say they have a platform with this kind of performance. and they would talk about if it would handle all the needs going foreword.

I have read hear in places were some Flex guys at Flex commented that they have been surprised as to the kind of abilities the hardware has. more than they imagined.

Ken - NM9P

Guy,  The way I understand it is this:  (in extremely layman's terms, which is about all I can understand).

When designing SDR radios, especially like the 6000 series, you are starting with an antenna port and creating one (or more) of many types of Analog-to-Digital converters.  (and the reverse for transmit, along with switching, amplification and audio circuits.) Follow the A to D converter with processing, convert it to audio, and you are in business!

After that, all the "radio stuff" is done in software.  So you select a processor(s) powerful enough to make any calculations necessary to do "whatever."  You have a standard subset of functions you want to have, but know that there will be a myriad of additional "radio stuff" functions, so you add a little more muscle and memory to do the job.   And in the case of the 6000 series, as much as the production costs will allow...

Once you have decided upon which Processors you will be using, you turn the software team loose to program the basic functions, create an effective user interface, and then start adding bells and whistles.  All of this while the hardware team finalizes the inputs and outputs, connectors and interfaces, etc.

So it is essentially a parallel development process.  like Bill said.
Software development cannot begin until basic hardware decisions are made, but hardware doesn't need to be fully complete before software development begins.  Then as both teams communicate, they both alter their designs and expectations.  Probably involving hardware guys saying..."you can't do that," or "Have you thought about doing this?  The hardware will support it."    And the Software guys saying "You are joking? You can't do that in software, but you can add a couple of hardware parts and we can key it with software."  or "We are thinking about this really neat function, and all it needs from the hardware is...."

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the early stages of product development! .... It must have been entertaining at times, and frustrating as heck at others!

Now, I may be totally overruled by the FRS team and shown to be full of hot air, or at least a few misconceptions, but this is what I have gleaned from many articles I have read.

Ken - NM9P
(Steve and others, please be merciful!  hi hi.)

Stan VA7NF

Two associated thoughts:

Number 1:  We are looking at version 1 of hardware and software coming together.  Tie together a super-computer and a group of components (e.g. Rx, Tx, Com layer, ...) with controllable hooks and features (our hardware) with initial software on that computer.  Let it stew for a couple of years and we see what it can do, and start to see how to do it better.  Now dream/imagine/blue sky/... towards the next generation.  The 6000 series is that base.  It is the V2 where these dreams become reality.  Looking forward to the 7000 series that will do things we can hardly dream about.

So far the amateur community is fixated on what we can do with V1 of the hardware/software;  it has been around a year and we are just getting our heads around the present.  It is time to imagine the "impossible" as that will be our future.

Number 2:  Flex radio has a military division.  The "crowd funding" exercise from Dayton to delivery should become a textbook example for technology funding.  Guy, my "chicken and egg" thought is which drives what?  Amateur funding/test bed/community vs military deep pockets/strategic direction/ vs new components R&D.

oops - That's three and it blows the chicken and egg analogy.

Perhaps we should have another community thread for pure science / dreaming type discussions; one that forbids the "when will it be implemented" question and leaves the "the noise mitigation doesn't meet present day expectations" type question in the past.

73s

Stan Williams - VA7NF
A dreamer that has, for example, seen James Kirk's communicator become the flip-phone and then morph into that do-everything hand held we take for granted. and **** Tracey's watch become modern wearables.

Ken - NM9P

Stan, my wife handed me my iPad yesterday and said, "Do you remember watching Star Trek Next Generation and dreaming about having a tablet that would allow you to read a book and type messages?"  

Yes, those of us who are old enough to remember Star Trek Generations 1 and 2 have seen a LOT of things become reality, including Lt. Ohura's little 'baby bottle' in her ear that has become the Bluetooth earpiece....

I have been a dreamer ever since watching the original episodes as a kid in the 60's!

Ken - NM9P

James Kirk

Ditto

Bill -VA3WTB

Hey guys, did you see were Tim said this the other day? ( getting ready for Dayton, a new SmartSDR software release and that new thing we are going to talk more about tomorrow, )  I wonder what he meant ...do you think they have more planed?

James Whiteway

I think that post was from earlier this year.

Bill -VA3WTB

I think your right!!

DrTeeth

Doctor Who was and is my Sci-Fi ****. I remember seeing doors that opened with a wave of the hand and my father took me to Manchester Airport in the North of England to see and play with them for real - that was about 50 years ago.

Steve-N5AC

Ken basically has it right.  The FLEX-6000 was born out of a government project we did that involved direct sampling.  At the time in 2010 we all believed (as Elecraft has publicly stated) that it would not be possible to build a direct sampling receiver with as much dynamic range as a superhet or direct conversion radio.  When we did the government project, Gerald worked a lot on the numbers and RF architecture and we discussed how to get the best dynamic range out of a direct sampling receiver.  We were able to use a very early sample of an Analog Devices ADC in that project and found that we were getting better dynamic range than even Analog was reporting, largely because of how we selected key parameters.  Gerald realized that we could build a better direct sampling radio than anything we'd built before.

Once we realized it was possible to build a direct sampling radio, all the "what if..." conversations started.  What could we do if we did this?  What would someone do with that?  Would it be better if we did this or that?  At the time, PowerSDR was the de facto standard in SDR, but we were keenly aware of the limitations of the architecture.  Namely that it would not work well in the IoT (Internet of Things) age, remote would be a kludge, the more data we wanted to process the more powerful computer you would have to buy, etc.  It's just not scalable.  At the time, the HPSDR team had built a working direct sampling receiver and we looked over their architecture and considered it.  It also had the critical flaw of having to have a **** communications pipe to the computer.  We decided putting the processor in the radio was the way to go.  

We contacted Intel, Freescale, Texas Instruments, Xilinx and Altera and had meetings with each to discuss what technologies we could use to build the compute engine in the radio.  We briefly discussed doing everything in an FPGA, but this was quickly ruled out because it takes roughly 10x to build the same thing in an FPGA as you can build in a processor.  Our Avnet/Xilinx FAE at the time put it very matter-of-factly when she said something like: "FPGAs are hard.  You wouldn't use them if you had any other way of doing it."  But to do direct sampling, an FPGA was required.  At this point we knew that we were going to be marrying an FPGA and a processor.  All the while that we are making these decisions about the hardware, I'm thinking about how the software will work and building the architecture for that in my head.  

FPGAs can have what are called "soft processors" which are processors that are actually built in the fabric of the FPGA.  We have used these before and they can be handy, but there is a key problem: all of them are limited to about 100-150MHz of clock speed.  We knew that this wouldn't cut it.  Several of the FPGAs have what are called "hard processors" which are processors that are part of the silicon and they run at native speeds, in the 750-1500MHz range.  Xilinx previously had used PowerPC, but now was promoting a new family called Zynq which included an ARM processor.  The world has largely abandoned PowerPC and MIPS and settled on ARM for embedded licensed processors.  We liked the ARM architecture and the toolset and toolchain were rich -- we were sure that ARM would be around for a while.  But Zynq was expensive and and brand new.

We talked with Intel who had a line of embedded processors and we liked those OK, but there seemed to be a lot of interface work required with them.  We moved to talking with Freescale and TI because each had DSP processors which we felt would give us a lot more power since we were going to be doing DSP.  TI was a full generation ahead of Freescale at the time so we got serious about TI.  TI had better raw compute power and we really liked where they were going so we picked TI.  We also had a good relationship with TI and felt like that would help us.  All the while that Gerald and I were visiting with these companies, we would walk out of the meetings and talk about what we could do for ham radio with each solution.

We ended up picking Xilinx and TI for the computing parts.  At this point, I had a pretty good idea what the software architecture was going to look like and so Eric and I started talking about the software architecture in detail.  Our codename for the radio was MICROBURST and SmartSDR's codename was SMOOTHLAKE.  Eventually, SMOOTHLAKE got the name SmartSDR and I think it was from Klaus, DK7XL, our EU representative.  

The path we picked was filled with peril and we received advice that we could easily **** the company with the decision we had made.  We knew that if we could do this, we would advance the technology in ham radio in one huge leap.  Gerald asked the team if we were committed to making this radio happen.  This is one of those moments where someone looks you in the eye and you know that this is a real commitment -- if we failed, there would be grave financial consequences for us and our employees.  Everyone made a commitment and we got to work.

Gerald started working on the hardware design and picked other key parts including the DAC, the Codec, power supplies, etc.  As I recall, Eric and I started coding before we had hardware.  Gerald did most of the PCB design and layout and I did some of the mind-numbing layout work on the ADC, DAC and DDR3 memory.  At some point we got a working PCB and we started the effort to bring up the processor.  Hardest. Thing. Ever.  I'll spare you the details, but Eric and I spent about 3-4 months bringing up the processor.  I am so much smarter now than I was then.  

At this point, Eric and I sequestered ourselves and wrote the core foundations of SmartSDR.   We spent hours at my house in the lab writing software and we would periodically call in and let everyone know what we were able to achieve.  Gerald was off designing the PA while we worked software magic.  Bob McGwier, N4HY, visited a couple of times for about a week at a time and helped us write DSP software.  We would literally get up at dawn, eat breakfast and then go into the lab and work, emerging only for food.  We had only one or two working prototypes at the time.  At one point we decided to pull a joke on Gerald.  I rigged a couple of 1/4W resistors to a 12V supply where they would sink about 5W and we taped it to the bench.  We called Gerald on FaceTime and Bob was supposed to tell Gerald what we had working.  At a key point, I flipped the switch and smoke came billowing out from under the prototype and Bob feigned despair that the prototype was destroyed to tease Gerald.  As it turns out, we had a communications issue and all that didn't make it to Gerald so he was spared the grief, but we all got a laugh out of it.  My bench still has a small black scar from the resistors ;-).  I don't know how many hours a week we were working, but it was a lot.  We would get to the point in the evening where the code we were writing didn't make sense and we would go to bed and get up the next day and do it over again.

From the beginning we knew many of the things the radio would be capable of based on the hardware and we did things in the hardware to make sure we could do as many things in the future as we could dream up.  To this day, we have a long list of fantastic things that we can do in the radio and the main thing standing in the way is writing the code.  We continue to add new ideas to that list and work on all the things on the list.  As the FLEX-6000 has continued to sell well, we continue to hire more engineers to execute that list faster and faster.  Now the ideas come from everywhere -- customers, advisers, employees, etc.  We work on key priorities and the best ideas based on an internal plan (much of which is shared with you in the roadmap).  

So there's essentially in the design process there is communications between the hardware designer knowing the available parts and the software architecture designer on what's possible.  The hardware guy might say "if I add this capability, could you use it?" or the software guy might say "is there any way you could give me thins kind of data?"  You work together to figure out what gets you the most value for the buck and the engineering investment and you go with that.

Designing and building the FLEX-6000 and SmartSDR with the team at FlexRadio has, without a doubt, been the most rewarding experience in my career.  I've never worked with a better team of people.  With the SmartSDR foundation, our engineers can visit with a customer at a hamfest, hear a great idea, say "I can do that" and then return home and make it a reality.  As an engineer it's extremely satisfying to be able to envision what a customer wants and be able to make that a reality.  The FLEX-6000 hardware platform is the most programmable platform we've ever had and we can do just about anything on it -- which is why we designed it the way we did.

Sorry for the novel!  I hope it gives you some insight into how we do this at FlexRadio.  It's probably different other places, but there are probably similarities.  

James Kirk

This reply has just made my day....really, what a great read.

Bill -VA3WTB

This was a wonderful read for me too, Thank you very much. I hope every one reads this...

Gerald-K5SDR

Oh, my gosh does this bring back the memories!  Steve provided a very accurate description of the birth of the FLEX-6000 Series and SmartSDR.  Very few people outside our company understand the underlying power of the platform our team has built.  

Stan VA7NF

Thanks Steve, your novel is a good read. 

Now, about the 7000 series hardware, with plug in Rx/Tx boards, water or PCM cooling and liquid nitrogen superconducting computers, external or internal blades for VLF to Terahertz Rx/Tx, ...

And then the change of NR to NE (noise Reduction to noise Elimination) with noise signatures, harmonic adaptation, phase adaptations, multi-path adaptations, predictive calculations for all noise in a filter width, comparison against real, noise killing.  That integrated with the GUI, perhaps I want to block all and only listen for sky-to-earth lightning within 100Km to lower the tower and ground all antennae.

Thanks again Steve.

James Whiteway

Stan, you missed one! I want the ability to pick either  single, or multiple signal
in my passband, (example a jammer or two on SSB) and clicking on them in the panadaptor  and eliminating them! Imagine, having a qso with someone and some LID decides to start talking over you. CLICK! He's gone! Or he gets a buddy or two to jump in as well.........CLICK!! They're gone!!!
(well, I can dream!!)
james
WD5GWY
 

Ken - NM9P

Wow! Thanks, Steve. That was some wonderful insight into the process and internal culture at FRS. Now you have me drooling over additional possibilities. It would be interesting, as a teaser to see some of the list of possibilities, even if none of them are currently on any of the developmental road maps. A look at someone else's list often stimulates a bigger list in my own mind. I would imagine that it would be easy for a group like this, combined with your engineering group, to come up with enough good ideas to keep your team busy for the next ten years! Ken - NM9P

DrTeeth

Thanks Steve for that. I almost feel guilty by asking the original question, but it was worth it.

@ James - do you mean the LID's signal has gone or the LID himself has been vapourised? If the latter, it sounds good, hi hi.

Bob- W5TX

First, a disclaimer. I am Steve's dad and my shirt buttons are popping with pride. I retired from Collins 20 plus years ago and I was fortunate to have spent some one on one time with Art Collins who I believe in his time was a visionary . Having watched remotely, the Flex process since Steve has joined, I see the same kind of future view taking place. I believe that in the tomorrows we will look back and realize that we as users and Flex as innovators are in the midst of a game changing process just like the advent of widespread implementation of SSB some 50 plus years ago. What a great time.

DrTeeth

Some people will do anything for a discount, hi hi. Seriously, seems like you have seen some very fascinating things.

I just hope the software keeps on improving enough so I don't have to splash out on a new rig anytime in the foreseeable future, I had enough trouble getting my 6300 past the XYL, especially having 2 teenage children.

Best 73 Guy

Steve K9ZW

Steve N5AC and the FRS Team!

First what an awesome inspiring story!  "Well done" is such an understatement.

Second, could I have permission to repost the story part of this thread?  It deserves a wider audience and I'd be happy to carry it on "With Varying Frequency."

Thank you for the insight into the background of what makes the 6700 and 6300 I've been using the jump forward field use has been confirming!

73

Steve

K9ZW