Getting ready for tomorrow

OK, the first day of NIWeek, or to be more precise, of pre-NIWeek just came to an end with the Kick-off Happy Hour. Before that I attended the Exclusive Show Floor Preview. This tour took the international press - except for the Chinese/Japanese who had their own group - along the major attractions of mainly NI. Since I was also present at NIWeek 2010, I was able to separate the upgrades and evolutions from the real novelties. Of course, the really spectacular demos will only start tomorrow during the keynotes of the Grand Opening.

I will talk more about interesting applications and products in the days to come when I will have more time to talk to the people presenting them. Yet I would like to mention one of the most impressive things on display: the Hermes Spacecraft. This is a project a guy started alone in his garage, now he is being helped by engineers from Intel who have too much spare time on their hands. The goal is nothing less than commercial space travel!

Check out Sensational Susan online.

USRP update: as it turns out, the USRP-2920 is not 100% identical to the USRP N210, but I did not yet have the opportunity to find out what the differences are exactly.

SDR soon playing at a university near you

Two years ago I assisted at a meeting at Elektor during which Software Defined Radio (SDR), GNU radio and its hardware platform the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) were discussed. The GNU radio people were really convincing and I liked the concept, but since then I didn't hear much of it. One of the reasons, I thought, was that the USRP (version 2 at the time) was quite an expensive platform.

During the visit of the University of Texas (UT) this morning a wireless class was presented that was based on SDR. The hardware platform was a PXI from National Instruments and the programming was done, of course, in LabVIEW. The goal of the course is to familiarise students with wireless concepts and instead of treating the subject only in a theoretical way, the UT decided to use an SDR hardware platform so that students can easily implement and try out the concepts in the real world. An excellent concept if you ask me.

Instead of keeping it a UT-only course they went a step further and developed an educational package that other schools and universities can buy from the UT. This package includes two now-where-did-I-see-you-before? USRPs (on the left in the photo). Actually, the USRP is now an NI product because NI bought Ettus Research in February 2010. I am afraid this will not really help to lower the price of the USRP.

I don't know if there is a difference between the USRP N210 that you can buy from Ettus and which looks identical to the USRP-2920 from NI, but maybe I can find that out this afternoon during the special USRP session?