[hpsdr] USBBlaster-Binaries

[Henry Vredegoor]

Hi Joe,

I indeed sent it to you privately first, but then I saw my mistake and 
forwarded it to the reflector too.

Thank you for the explanation, I got the picture now and understand that 
it would not be a simple hardware mod.
I was not suggesting to make a completely new -EU board of course, but 
only to do a "field-change" of the existing EU-boards.

Thanks again and good luck with your good work, its very much appreciated!

73's,

Henry - PA0HJA

    On 10/25/2011 4:37 PM, Joe Martin K5SO wrote: Hi Henry,

    I think you sent the message only to me, and not to the list, but no
    matter.  The answer to your questions are:

    1)  There are a dozen or so pins that differ between the -EU and
    -TAPR Mercury boards, due to the different physical locations of
    parts on the -EU relative to the location of parts on the -TAPR
    board.  Further, the -EU board doesn't have some of the supporting
    chips, modules, jumpers, and headers that the -TAPR board has.  
    Most of these physical differences aren't terribly important except
    that the bus lines and lines to the ADC and other chips are
    connected to the FPGA using different physical pins on the FPGA than
    in the -TAPR case.  The result is that the firmware needs to be
    compiled with the different physical FPGA pin assignments mapped to
    the various Verilog variables in the code.  When you do that mapping
    the code will generally run successfully in the -EU arrangement.

    2) No, producing a new "-EU" board doesn't make fiscal sense and it
    isn't possible to "modify" an existing -EU board to somehow re-route
    the pin connections on it to match the -TAPR board unless you cut
    traces and run external wires all over the board (argh!!! ugly...and
    it wouldn't operate the same anyway since the circuit board layout
    is designed to minimize spurs, etc and jumpers would destroy those
    design features).  Besides, iQuadLabs has already invested in
    building and stocking actual Mercury-TAPR boards so it would not
    make sense for Gerd or anyone else to "re-do" the -EU board that
    users would need to purchase in any case.  They should simply buy
    the -TAPR board from iQuadLabs instead and have an actual HPSDR rig.

    Of course, there are a number of -EU boards out there already and
    rather than leaving those folks out in the cold and forcing them to
    buy new Mercury-TAPR boards there is a desire within the HPSDR group
    to keep them supported even though the -EU board is not an official
    HPSDR product.  Gerd produced his Mercury-EU board outside of the
    official HPSDR project, you know.

    Hope that helps.

    73,  Joe K5SO


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