Difference between revisions of "OZY"

Revision as of 04:14, 8 April 2007

OZYmandias - HPSDR Host Interface & Control

General Description:

The OZY was designed by Philip Covington [1], N8VB.

The OZY module is an FPGA based interface controller card that provides the input and output connections to the real world. The use of an Altera Cyclone II FPGA provides numerous control lines for interfacing the various boards connected to the Atlas backplane.

A block diagram of OZY is shown below.

Block diagrams of the OZY Verilog code:

OZY also provides a high speed USB 2.0 interface to the controlling PC. The USB interface uses a Cypress FX2 chip [2] which greatly simplifies the design, development time and effort. The FX2 supports full duplex USB communications at > 30MB/s, which should allow sufficient bandwidth for current and future requirements.

The FPGA also provides the necessary control logic and data formatting for the Janus board as well serial and parallel interfaces for user defined I/O.

Whilst specifically designed to support the various HPSDR modules the OZY board makes an excellent general purpose FPGA development system. The source code to both the FX2 and FPGA software is available under GPL and the board is very cost competitive compared with other FPGA development systems.

One highly desirable feature of the OZY board will be the ability to measure the various high frequency crystal oscillators used by the HPSDR by using the 1 pps clock from a GPS receiver. The GPS clock will be used to gate the various oscillators and report the count to the PC via the USB interface. Since the PC will have prior knowledge of exactly what these frequencies should be, then any errors can be corrected in software. The result will be a radio with extremely high frequency accuracy and stability -- a boon for microwave operators.

The latest schematic of the OZY board can be found at: http://www.philcovington.com/HPSDR/OZY/REVB/

The latest PCB files can be found at: http://www.philcovington.com/HPSDR/OZY/REVB/CAM/

The BOM for OZY is available at: http://sales.digikey.com/scripts/ru.dll?action=pb_view&pb_glue=1011790

OZYMANDIAS??? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

Current Status: 04/05/2007: First production board:

2/11/2007: Ready for production.

12/10/2006: Initial tests of Ozy V2 indicate all functions are OK - VK6APH.

11/30/2006: All Alpha 2 kits arrived (including VK6APH in Oz).

11/20/2006: All Alpha 2 kits shipped.

11/18/2006: The parts for the Alpha 2 release are in hand and kitted for the test team. The PCBs were shipped today via overnight service, and should arrive Monday, Nov 20. With luck, all Alpha 2 kits should be enroute to the testers the same day.

10/06/2006: The schematic and PCB board layout for REVB of OZY is complete. This revision corrects issues we found in OZY REVA alpha 1 boards. See OZY_REVA_ALPHA_REVLIST for issues that were corrected.

08/15/2006: All Alpha OZY boards are now working. The Janus FPGA code has been ported and is working correctly. Phil, VK6APH, had the first QSO using the OZY + Janus + Atlas combination on 12th August 2006. Check out of all the I/O functions continues.

07/20/2006: OZY Utilities are written to allow firmware download and FPGA upload via USB using libUSB. A C# class library was written to allow the use of libUSB with C# programs and IronPython.

07/10/2006: OZY now has firmware! Work is under way to switch to libUSB instead of the Cypress driver.

07/07/2006: OZY has been completely assembled minus two components, the Dallas serial to 1-Wire converter and a diode on the logic analyzer port (parts on backorder -estimated ship date 07/07/2006). The Cypress CY7C68013A (FX2) enumerates on USB. The I2C EEPROM on board was programmed with a C0 load with VID 0xFFFE and PID 0x0007. The CyUSB.sys driver's inf file was modified to include the VID/PID. Later the LibUSB-Win32 driver will be used instead. The Cyclone II FPGA was loaded with a test program via JTAG and the test program was successfully run. The next task is to load firmware into the FX2 to allow downloading of the FPGA code over USB.

See OZY_REVA_ALPHA_REVLIST for proposed additions/changes to the OZY design before it is released for production.

See OZY_REVA_STARTUP for notes/issues on debugging/startup of the OZY alpha board.

See http://www.philcovington.com/HPSDR/OZY_PICS/HiRes/ for high resolution pictures of the assembled Ozy board. Assembled OZY as of 07/14/2006: