Teensy SDR question

[CarlOlsson]

Dear Rich,

I just came across your Teensy SDR platform, very impressing! I am currently researching the feasibility of a project that I would like to try. Just wanted to ask you if you think it is even possible since I don’t have much experience in SDR.

I would like to build an ADS-B receiver using a microcontroller, maybe the Teensy. The idea is to use a RTL-SDR dongle and do the baseband processing on the Teensy.

Everything would be open source of course.

Looking forward to your answer

Best
Carl


[rheslip]

Interesting you should ask me that since I just got an SDRPlay dongle which is a much improved version of an RTL-SDR. I was wondering if I could host it from the Teensy. It might be possible if you can get a low enough sample rate but the Teensy has very limited processing power. You'd have to rewrite the dongle driver and probably some of the USB host code as well, then you have to write the sample buffer management and DSP code. This is a non-trivial exercise...
You'd be better to experiment with the Teensy audio library to learn more about DSP before tackling a project like you describe. Studying the source for the audio library will give you an appreciation of how much work the driver code is.
A more practical approach to your ADSB decoder idea may be to find or design an I/Q front end that can run fast enough for the aviation bands but doesn't use USB. ie downconvert directly to I/Q audio and process that with the Teensy and the audio shield. USB - particularly USB host mode is quite hard to do on a small microcontroller.
I intend to write some code for the SDRPlay but I will probably use Python, my Core I7 machine and use somebody's existing driver. I found a really interesting project the other night you may want to check out - I cooked up a simple RTL-SDR spectrum scope in a few minutes with this:
http://www.pothosware.com/
Regards, Rich

Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2015 11:15:37 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Teensy_SDR] Teensy SDR question (#2)

Dear Rich,

I just came across your Teensy SDR platform, very impressing! I am currently researching the feasibility of a project that I would like to try. Just wanted to ask you if you think it is even possible since I don’t have much experience in SDR.

I would like to build an ADS-B receiver using a microcontroller, maybe the Teensy. The idea is to use a RTL-SDR dongle and do the baseband processing on the Teensy.

Everything would be open source of course.

Looking forward to your answer

Best

Carl

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[CarlOlsson]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the response! I will do as you proposed and continue studying the subject. I found this project about the ADS-B RF front end. So much interesting stuff to read.

Best
Carl