[014] IcoBoard Software Defined Radio Project - Hardware 

I just want to take a moment to say thank you. Your open source, low budget, and simple explanations as to why you're doing what you're doing makes daunting projects like this seem within the grasp of poor aspiring engineers. So thank you!

I subscribed when I realised that this WASN'T one of those videos which starts with "Hey guys, what's happening?" videos. Instead, it was intelligent and articulate, and I look forward to some more ... whenever you're ready.

39:59 and people thought Julian Illet's reflow method using halogen lamps was ghetto... Bravo sir. I asked for something like this exact method in response, and you happened to provide!

There are not so many youtubers out there who could script their contents in this beautiful way. You are a genius person indeed.

Keep up the great work - your knowledge and dedication to demonstrating open source tech is much appreciated. Hope you have a smooth transition to the new location and look forward to the interim videos!

Thanks for putting together this nice and insightful long-format video ! I really appreciate the huge effort you put in producing such content.

Your videos are always an incredible inspiration to me, always totally full of extremely useful and interesting content, with tons of effort and passion just oozing with every frame. I hope your move goes well.

Extremely in-depth and insightful, thank you for producing these videos.

This was actually a better KiCad tutorial than 5 or 6 other videos that actually have KiCad in the title. Thank you!

I really hope you can continue with the channel. Your videos are absolutely excellent. Thanks!

Best hour spent in a very long time, Sorry to hear that you are forced to relocate. Thank you for awesome open source content!

FYI, you don't have to add those fake test point components in the schematic editor in order to put plated mounting holes on your board. You can simple use the "add footprints" button on the toolbar on the right (4th from the top that looks like an IC), find the mounting hole footprint, and place it where you want it. Then hover your mouse pointer over the mounting hole, press "E" and make sure you select "Pad 1" from the "Clarify selection" pop-up menu. In this properties menu, you can assign any net you like (such as GND) to this pad. Also, it's a lot easier to use hot keys "B" to fill zones and "Ctrl-B" to unfill zones. Or you can right-click on the zone outline to get a context menu that will also give you that option.

The content you're producing is great! Hope your move goes as smooth as possible

Whoa, great video! I wish you made these more frequently, but I can see how that one must have taken forever to do, given how much you progressed in the project. I personally really would like to have more time for projects like these… All the FPGA stuff is really interesting.

Great channel, just found it. Really enjoy the videos a lot. You're very curious and thats fantastic.

Fantastic video. Lots of really useful information and explanation. Good luck with the move.

Oh and, awesome video man! really liked the effort done here!

If you want to fill or refresh the copper pour, you can also press 'B' on your keyboard. That's usually faster than running a full DRC job, but impossible to figure out if you don't already know it. 🙂

I'm only 30 seconds in, but I already know I'm going to love this video!

Glad to hear we're getting you back to blighty. Not the most cheerful time to arrive but wish you well in your job hunt and looking forward to future videos. Would love to get more basics/beginners stuff on sdr.

Liked the video before hitting the play button 🙂 Good luck with your move.

Regarding Kicad zone fill: you can press the 'B' key to fill/refill the zone at any time. Very convenient. Have a look at Preferences -> Hotkeys -> List Hotkeys to find more useful shortcuts. Ctrl+B removes the fills. Very informative video as always, thanks for making them!

Pretty instructive and detailed video. Awesome channel with awesome topics. Thanks a lot.

Great video! Really loved it, I also been into SDR for last 2 years

Thank you so much for this informative show about the fpga it really opened this field for me! I'm sad to hear that you are moving I hope you could find a kickass job back in the UK. I would love to see some videos explaining jtag, and verilog development in the context of that fpga as i also got one as well(the lower end version) and love to follow on some cool project :) Cheers.

I LOVE your reflow oven!

I really appreciate the amount of efforts you put into making these videos. Hope you get the job you dreamed of! Meanwhile, I’d like to see some basic videos about using FPGAs and also DSP fundamentals.

That was one epic video covering a great cross-section of topics! Well done! I totally feel your pain on the Kicad libraries and 3D models moving target. While I've achieved satisfying results with Kicad, a large proportion of time spent was wasted following the documentation's way of doing things, ,which later turned out to be obsolete and wrong.

I found loads of information and tit-bits that need to be read up on later (later, being in a couple of minutes) in this video. Great stuff Joel and thankyou for posting! Btw, an advert popped-up during the video reference a company called Alorium who make arduino/arduino IDE compatible fpga boards. Had a quick look, as you do, and found the board model Hinj to be quite interesting.....worth taking a look at! :)

Nice. Hope your moving going well.

Love this video. Did you ever do more with this? I did search the channel and couldn't find anything. Personally, I'd love to see a full FPGA design (without the RasPi) - with all the filtering/freq selection/LCD driver, etc. in the FPGA... Could be a fun DSP project.

I love the "fundamentals" idea. Perfect for beginners like me.:)

Thank you love from belagavi Karnataka India !

The best videos! Keep them coming! I would love if you could cover the more basic programming in C.

This is the first of your videos I have ever seen...and I loved it. I wish I had some of the resources you do because it would make things so much easier for me. I want to build a SDR for mobile use, but it has a number of requirements that are not usual on a "normal" SDR project. For one thing, it must tolerate extreme temperatures ( -55° to 125° C ) , cover 500 Khz to 450 Mhz, all modes INCLUDING FM STEREO on receive only, have multiple USB connections...probably 2 would be enough..., and have all the computer resources required as part of the unit. Being a "PRE-Novice" with all things SDR, I am more than groping in the dark...more like completely lost. Though your video has given me a degree of hope. Also, I have KiCAD installed on my computer, but I need to design a few circuits that use Vacuum Tubes (Valves) and I cannot locate a library of the sockets to mount the tubes in. Some of the tubes I might use at a later date even have different size pins on them. Could you provide any assistance to point me in the right direction so that I can do layouts with the tubes? Sorry to hear you must return to England....not that there is anything bad or wrong with England, just that the way you stated it, it sounds like your move is a painful one for you and that you really didn't want to go back. In hopes that things go well for you and that you will be able to make more videos, I will subscribe to your channel. 73, Wayne WB4RHA

Thanks for another awesome video! I would love to see more content from you on implementing USB on microcontroller. One of your videos does a great job of how to work with vendor control requests using libopencm3. It'd be great to see another video like that for data transfer using bulk requests. I've yet to come across any information on how to handle data streaming using bulk transfers on microcontrollers. Thanks!

Great video.

Man! Hat's off to you. I'm in awe. Where do you get the energy to do all of this; not to mention to document the whole process in video's like this one? Thank you very much.

This is hilarious! Last year I designed the same concept of FPGA module with a motherboard breakout... But I used the Cyclone V FPGA and an atmel SAM E70

The cost to make three boards with stencils is simply amazing. The cost when I got started required approval from a VP or the President of the company because it was so insane. Now you or I can just go out a make boards left and right for the price of a Happy meal at MacDonalds. The problem with lead free solder / solder paste is the difficulty in cleaning the flux. I worked at a place that was hell bent on using a dish washer to clean boards and the results were conductive paths between signals (Not meant to be connected) Hi voltage stuff arced between points. The nit wit chief of this company issued tooth brushes to the assembler crew who tried to clean the water soluable flux before putting them in the washer. This didn't really improve things. By the way when you are done (using lead free solder) all the connections look awful. With lead tin solder good connections look shiny and bad ones look like lead free connections. I forget exactly what was done to make the dishwasher work. Something to do with processing the water ahead of time but I would never advise anyone to use that garbage for prototypes. Oh and you clean Rosin Core with 99% isopropyl Alcohol. (EBAY they have cases of the stuff) The amount of lead you absorb by handling a roll of it? I'm not sure its even measurable. One thing I would be aware of is breathing in flux fumes. Your not going to breath in Lead (The temp to vaporize it is higher) If your hand soldering with your face over the board sucking in fumes your doing damage to your lungs. I think smoking cigars would be better. They make "soldering fans" that suck up the smoke but its actually just a fan pointed away from you. Solder paste is (I admit) easy to get on your skin, cloths etc so maybe glove up if your really paranoid. Anyway don't scare the kids! Lead is not like handling Plutonium. Oh and you can use a toaster oven to do your boards. Put them on top of the over to warm them up then into the actual oven. Keep a close eye on the components. When the Lead Tin combo melt all the parts will move slightly. Thats when you know its done. *Note there are controllers that you cobble onto a toaster oven that do this but this is not required.

To refill zones, just press B. Also Prefernces->Hotkeys->List Current Keys is your friend ;)

You sir need more views!

Quick tip: you can press b or control b to fill and unfill zones in kicad without having to run the DRC

Thank you, I really enjoyed this video, it covered a lot of topics that are interesting to me. Sorry to hear you won't be making more like it for a while, but best wishes for the move. I would love to see some more in depth KiCad and FreeCAD videos when you are able to!

best youtube electronics videos

Awesome

This video you just created on SDR hardware forced my heart to create a Patreon account and pledge to you monthy. Warm regards. I hope you become the next Dave Jones (EEVBlog Guy)

Good video, I wish you the best of luck with moving back to the UK and all the logistics surrounding it. Do you think the setup that you have built in this video can be used to create a open source oscilloscope and signal generator?

I often make my own mounting hole component so that the schematic can have really obvious mounting hole call outs on it.

The “kick in the teeth” bit… Oh man, that’s brutal, but I have to admit, I LOL’d in sardonic sympathy. Those parts ain’t cheap, either, so stocking up now will be a bit costly. FWIW, you can get MG solder paste on amazon (US), which includes the plunger and a tip. Also, you can pop off the tabs of OSHPark PCBs with a pair of needle nose, then file down the mouse bites. I just rub my boards on the concrete floor of my shop to get rid of the sharp points. Janky, but that’s how I roll most of the time. =)

Love the video (and everything else you do). In terms of the coding approach to CAD, do you find it quicker than the more common graphical way or is it force of habit?

Adding a layer of sand to the bottom of the pan for the PCB to rest on will provide a more even heating.

Thanks for the great video! I tried to do repeat this project with BlackIce II board and I noticed something strange. I used a T-shaped BNC connector to pass a signal from signal generator to both FPGA and an Oscilloscope (I use same signal generator and oscilloscope you did) so I could compare how an output signal changes comparing to input signal. Oscilloscope shows that the output signal is an inverse (180 degree phase shifted) of the input sine signal. This effect doesn't change with frequency or signal shape. Could you please explain why this happens?

There is a less liquid form of solder paste which usually works better when using stencils

Great ambitious vid, has about 10 separate interesting topics, well done. I'm sure shorter videos covering a single topic will be great.

Great video, really in-depth and informative, but... That solder paste bit really made me cringe. You have to apply that stuff like you were screen printing it. Never put it directly on the holes of the stencil. Even less use that card or anything to push it through. What you do is put some on the top of the stencil and use the card as a squeegee and rake it over the openings *once* and then try to lift the stencil without moving it laterally. Also, when you are reworking bad solder joints a bit of flux will save you a lot of headache. HTH and cheers for the great videos!

missleading video description, but some imortant content

This stuff is for engineers. Few of the rest of us can follow it

Give component search engine a go, they got a lot of footprints, symbols and 3d models for all kinds of parts

I'll have to look at kicad, would it happen to have library support for the ICE40 fpga's? I'm interested in making my own board for the little beastie.

Wow thanks so much! I always like your video's but this one is so long and full of info, incredible! Thanks! One question you always seem to advertise the Chinese sites as low cost but in the Netherlands all these products above 20$ will be picked out by customs and you have to pay clearing, tax and administrative costs... Is this not a problem in the UK? Thanks again!

Damn, not using Dave Jones's open hardware icons, how am I supposed to know at a glance if the firmware of this board is available :)

dont you need a local oscillator which signal is mixed with the input signal and then converted to baseband? and arent there two ADCs needed, one for the inphase and one for the quatrature signal?

@SignalPath channel has many useful informations about that.

p.s. Solder Paste lasts a lot longer if you put it in the fridge!

Is there any common consumer gear where I might just find an fpga in the trash?

it really is a shame that this board and most other cheap fpga boards don't really expose a lot of the io capability, it would be really great to see some 0ohm jumpers to configure per bank io voltage and maybe do length matching of differential pairs, you wouldn't even have have them couple particular close wich might hinder single ended use, a couple unpopulated ldo footprints also wouldnt hurt, the lattice machxo2 and 3 breakout boards were quite nice in that regard expecially for interfacing data converters high speed serial is one of the major advantages fpgas offer

Can you build a TNC for radios?

I'm amazed you can reflow with a frying pan.

China taobao website also have an cheap 10 bit ADC and DAC board

Are the two a/d, d/a boards for IQ sampling?

I asume you will try to build an IQ Receiver so i wonder how you synchronise the two ADCs?

Can you do more with SDR video’s?

I think you can create a pad in pcbnew and set its net to GND so you don't have to have it in the schematics

During the reflow it would have been cool if you could have done picture-in-picture of sigrok-meter whilst the main pic is the paste melting.... that would have been cool (well, hot actually). Not really done much with CAD (it's part of why I'm watching this) But this takes me back the the early 90s... Open S CAD reminds me a bit of the POV-Ray language... and CAD query has hints of the code I used to write in C++ (it'd be Python if I did it now) for generating POV-Ray files. (Sorry, I don't think I've got a point, just an observation) Damnit! I used to have "a million" of those 50 ohm coax terminators and I threw them away... "don't need any of this old 10BASE2 Ethernet connectors anymore". :( IS THAT A BLOB OF COTTON WOOL ON YOUR MICROPHONE???!!!! Really interesting, video, I'm not sure if I'll ever DO any of this stuff... but there's plenty of pointers to other stuff that should keep me amused for a good long time. Keep up The Great Work.

Forgive if mentioned already, but having just watching one chap with very stiff paste, and yours,.. too thin by far. There must be a happy medium for use with stencils. I would say that flux is cheaper than the lead beads. ergo the quest for profit overtaking common sense. BTW on Thingiverse, I found an SCAD based Parametric Project Box maker. Love it . Pick your dimesion, front and rear panels, name plate, vent holes, holes and windows for knobs and displays. Grrreat stuff. Regards

you can buy some of boards from AliExpress they deliver world wide. I also build list of interesting fpga low/med/high cost boards if you interested. Alinx support only Chinese site, try to use translate in chrome, En site may miss a lot of products.

Scopy Mc-Scope Face lol thats what I call them scopes now!

Plans for a kicad tutorial

Graham, still working with your amazing videos?

With that viscosity solder paste the stencil really does nothing to help; as you see its all over the pads anyways. The stuff I generally use is really stiff, and you should keep it in the fridge to keep it nice and firm. Now, generally it's no problem though, the soldermask will make it go where it should unless there's much to much and generally, just doing a line of paste across the pads will be fine. And for doing the actual reflowing, a simple hot air station and a temp probe for the multimeter is perfectly sufficient for one off or a small number of boards. You really don't need to follow the temp profile to the letter either, just in the ballpark is fine.

Try Labcenter Proteus, so much easier to use than KiCAD

The documentation for Rev 1.0 of the AD/DA board (complete with schematic) can be found here: goo.gl/aAgkxL

You can get 3d models for most Molex connectors on their Website, no need to model it yourself (other than just for fun :P)

Hi, I use same A/D D/A board and use Altera EP4CE6 board to capture in case anyone interested I could give you link.

Anyone wanting to be inspired by what an FPGA can do, check out websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ This is a software defined radio implemented in a Spartan XC3S500E FPGA, sampling the whole spectrum from 0-30 MHz at the same time, and you can listen to any portion of it you want! There are three main IC's doing all the work - the Spartan FPGA, an LTC2216 A/D converter clocked at 77.76 MHz, and a gigabit Ethernet chip to allow the WebSDR software to work. Click on the "see here for background" link at the top of the page to see the evolution of this project. Truly amazing what the builder has accomplished here.

36:00 Is Pb the new Hg? Too much scare about a relatively harmless Element. Normally the pure metal doesn't do anything to your health (except it comes flying at a high speed or a bigger chunk of it falls of the workbench on to your toes). To get a high enough bioavailability, you need to have lead compounds (just like it is with Hg). These can be quite nasty and they can get created over time when Pb is ends up in our environment. These lead compounds may end up in the air/water or are then enriched in the food chain and we are at the top of the food chain. And because people are too lazy/ignorant/stupid to dispose or recycle their electronic waste in a environment friendly manner, the lead was banned in electronics.

the ADC only 8bit . think 10bit or 12bit will be better

The solder paste was too wet. It flowed under the stainless steel mask.

Another meaning to frying your board lol

your stencil was not been flat to the pcb, that's why the nasty spread, next time press the stencil to the pcb and don't poor the paste in the holes but drag it to the holes

I know you only want to use OSS but fusion360 would blow your mind in terms of parametric modelling.

Even your description of how you investigated the board is interesting and useful. I love how you don't just go, "I googled around and got the data sheet". That doesn't help people.

Easy ... N=((1.0*In_Voltage)/4); OV=(10.0*N);

This guy makes me feel like a bum

It's *NOT* Key-Cad, it's K eye Cad.

That stencil was completely useless

Oh god, I find discourse on of the worst forum software available

Tell the simple folk what is FPGA

He barely touches the real sdr. He just makes the video long. At the end you learn nothing about sdr.