Alphamax LLC now has details of the NeTV2 live, including links to preliminary schematics and PCB source files.
The key features of NeTV2 include:
- mPCIE v2.0 (5Gbps x1 lane) add-in card format
- Support for full 1080p60 video
- Artix-7 FPGA
- FPGA “hack port” breaking out 3x spare GTP transceiver pairs
- 512 MB of DDR3-800 @ 32-bit wide memory for frame buffering
I adopted an add-in card format to allow end users to pick the cost/performance trade-off that suited their application the best. Some users require only a text overlay (NeTV’s original design scenario); but others wanted to blend HD video and 3D graphics, which would require a substantially more powerful and expensive CPU. An add-in card allows users to plug into anything from an economical $60 all-in-one
As noted previously, we are currently seeking legal clarity on the suite of planned features for the product, including highly requested features such as alpha blending which require access to the descrambled video stream.
Hi Bunnie, looks very nice. But may I ask why you’ve opted for the separate MCU (instead of a fixed SPI/platform flash on the FPGA)? To make programming easier via USB on the PCIe connector?
The MCU is connected to the USB port embedded in a mPCIe card, and also connected to the FPGA configuration SPI ROM.
The ultimate idea is to make the product easier to customize by exposing a USB-based FPGA firmware update mechanism. If we used just a fixed SPI, then users would have to first acquire some sort of SPI programming device in order to customize the NeTV2’s abilities.
Very cool to see this! I was checking out the details on the Alphamax wiki and noticed the Altium schematics link was broken. I created an account to try to fix it but didn’t get any edit permissions (and I couldn’t create the Talk page to mention it there).
The current link is:
http://bunniefoo.com/netv2/netv-evt2-altium.zip
The correct link is:
http://bunniefoo.com/netv2/netv2-evt2-altium.zip
It’s easy to figure out given the PDF version of the schematic but seemed worth fixing.
thanks for catching that. I’ve fixed it. You /should/ have edit privileges, once you’ve confirmed your email. If you’ve confirmed your email and you still don’t let me know and I’ll try to fix that…
Ahh, thanks for that detail. The registration page showed email as optional. :)
I suppose it’s somehow compatible with the novena
Hi Bunny,
Thanks for all your work in HDMI it is very usefull!
Looking in the dvi_encoder_v2.v appear to not transmit the TERC4 (dat_ena not used). Do you have plan to support data island packets in the transmitter?
I learn something new. This ‘add- in card’ is the new way to enlarge the space capacity. Thanks, Bunnie.