V4 HW Discussion
From RFID Guardian
Contents |
RF40 Components
CPU board
Guardian V4 (RF40) has a separate CPU baby-board, which contains a beefy BlackFin (BF547 at 600MHz), 128MB DDR memory, 512MB NAND flash, and an RTC battery; this CPU board connects to the main board via a DIMM-200 connector.
Analog Parts
The Analog Front Ends (AFEs) contain radio antenna circuits, amplifiers, and DACs/ADCs. The AFEs are pluggable daughter boards for different RF frequencies: 13.56MHz will be the first, followed by LF and UHF frontends.
Screen
RF40 is equipped with a 320x240 TFT screen with touchscreen: Ampire AM-24030 with an Ilitek Ili9320 controller.
Main board
The main board houses:
- ethernet (Asix AX88796B, an NE2000-compatible);
- USB OTG, with hardware for both USB slave and USB host;
- 4 UARTs, one of which is connected to a smart BlueTooth module: a Modulestek MB-C041;
- beefy Altera FPGA: Cyclone III, EQFP144; most of the RF signal processing (filtering) will be done on the FPGA;
- async bus connects to the FPGA;
- the CPU can access the JTAG pins of the FPGA to upload a program to it;
- surround sound;
- programmable LEDs and pushbuttons;
- JTAG for the CPU;
- JTAG for the FPGA;
- DIMM-200 connector for the CPU baby-board;
- connector for an AFE;
- expansion connectors that export all BlackFin pins
The expansion connectors allow RF40 to be used as a Development board in itself.
Housing
The housing will have clippable antennas. The housing can comfortably contain a 13.56MHz antenna. UHF antennas are very small. What about LF antenna sizes? The housing has openings for changing the AFE, touchscreen, and a few LEDs/buttons.
HW Issue tracker for RFID Guardian V4 (RF40)
We have a separate bug tracker for issues we needed to fix in hardware in the Alpha hardware release
GPIO Layout
Enumeration of pin-layout all device and GPIO pins, including their mapping on the DIMM-200 connector
