Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Using the MIMO port for serial comm. to a Virtex5 board

[Charles Irick]

Hello again,
I decided to try and run the mimo_tx.bin (built from SVN rev 11663) as
the s/w firmware and use the Virtex5 board as the "slave USRP2" since
this would require almost no changes to the gnuradio side. I'm using
u2_rev3_ise10.1sp3_r11370.bin as the FPGA bitstream. When I run the
host app ./test_mimo_tx I get the following error and everything
freezes up (cannot ctrl-c, have to reboot the usrp2):
"usrp2::ctor reset_db failed"

Most people seem to be able to fix this with a firmware update because
of some new process in libusrp2 with initialization. If this is the
case then it must be something in mimo_tx.c that needs to be updated.
Either that or the host app. Any ideas?

Might be important: I'm not sure what type of modifications to mb-gcc
are imperative for building firmware for the aeMB, but I'm using the
standard version that comes with ISE for the vanilla microblaze as I
didn't want to mess up the toolchain for standard development.

Charles

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Charles Irick <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm looking to use the MIMO port to send serial data to a Virtex5
> board and am trying to get an idea of how to set up the USRP2 to
> achieve this.
>
> - I was wondering how a simple loopback test might be achieved.
> Something simple like taking what the TI chip gives the FPGA and
> sending it back out. Not sure if I should be concerning myself with
> the HDL code running on the Spartan 3. (usrp2/fpga/serdes)
> - It looks like I will probably have to flash the firmware and I'm not
> sure what the best s/w configuration would be. (mimo_tx.bin,
> serdes_txrx.bin, my own,  ...)
>
> My guess: I will need to create my own app.c in usrp2/firmware/apps
> which receives a serial packet and sends it back out, compile this,
> then flash it to the SD card to be run on the aeMB.
>
> I think I'm just trying to get an idea of what code I should be
> using/modifying to perform the tasks I want using the MIMO port.
>
> Charles
>