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mv4wd / RCHourglass

DIY lap timing system
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Cy8ckit-059 no longer readily available. #8

Closed KD0DSH closed 1 year ago

KD0DSH commented 1 year ago

I started looking into building a decoder and transponder for use in my own personal track with friends and family. However I am finding that thw CY8CKIT-059 is not a readily available part, most lead times are out a year or more. Any chance you would release the souce code for the decoder and teansponders so others can port this to more easily aquired hardware? Or maybe you could at least publish notes on how the transponders are decoded so that others could build up a system from there.

mv4wd commented 1 year ago

The source code of the transponder is available in the repository. The encoding of the number is available in the source of RCHourglass manager and is valid only for old transpoders. For RC4, no decoding is available, the transponder has to be learnt from reading multiple packets. This is discussed in deep in RCTech thread for the project. The closer description to the firmware is Howard Cano original schematic. The part the reads the BPSK signal (original TTL logic) is implemented in PSOC Verilog + UDBs. It's PSOC specific and not portable to another platform. Better start from the original schematic. The 'software' itself is just serial protocol command parsing. If you have knowledge of other platform I'll be glad to help with the implementation, I haven't found an affordable solution yet.

KD0DSH commented 1 year ago

mv4wd, Thanks for the Reply! I managed to find my way to the original forum and am starting to catch up to everyone else. At first glance I was expecting the signal decoding to be easier then its turning out to be and can see why you made the hardware selections you did. Unfortunately for us who are just jumping in, we don't have easy access to hardware for at least the next few months.

I am familiar with BPSK in the amateur radio world, though I think the packet rates are much much slower then this. I will have to ponder a bit, but I wonder if some software defined radio options could be leveraged for this task? Not sure if the cost would be in the same ballpark as the PSOC boards but it may be possible to put together an alternative at a manageable price tag.

I may have to attempt to put a transponder together or buy a commercially available one and see if I can find a way to capture the signal from it.

Is there any good resources describing for defining the data format? Digging into building transponder will probably help me with that...

Again, Thanks! If I manage to find a promising pathway Ill be sure to get it back to the group!

For those that are trying to answer the same questions I was go to RCTech.net and look for the RC Hourglass forum. Jump to the last page and work backward. That's the fastest way to understand more about what mv4wd wrote above.