Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
What hardware and software platform should I use for capturing certain signals
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ö:
First of all, this is about capturing raw data from Digital Compact Cassettes () to explore the last secrets, preserve rare ones and possibly later record new ones with the full feature set. A copy of the full standard appeared, that and the fact that the audio codec PASC was later standardized as MPEG Audio Layer 1 and the standardization of the text-standard ITTS (IEC 61866, never used for anything else btw) make this project seem possible without too much Reverse Engineering: https://archive.org/details/philips-dcc-system-description-draft/
I have the amplified binary signal from the DCC read amplifiers in two variants, parallel for each of the 9 tracks or time-multiplexed at 3.072 MHz with two clocks, one every 3.072 MHz for every individual track (the 10th timeslot is empty) and one 1/10 of that to indicate the start of the first track. The data rate including error correction overhead is roughly 1 MBit/s. The signal needs digital filtering (IIR and FIR) to account for distortion from the tape, so it has to be analog inputs (or programmable filters). The multiplexing seems like a cost-saving measure, but I hope for higher accuracy for fewer errors and thus dropouts by always capturing all tracks at the same time. It would be nice to have the same platform for easy testing and development as well as possible low-volume production that is modular enough that I can reuse most of the code for the two variants. Please tell me if nothing like this is reasonable and advise me what hardware and software comes closest:
I thought about the following:
Arduino: Discarded it right away, the sample rate, the bandwidth and the speed and the amount of analog inputs is far too low.
Saleae logic analyzers: Promising for easy development, but I see little to no way for integrating it in more polished products.
GNU Radio: FOSS and the modularity of software modules look very nice, but I did not find any supported hardware that goes down enough and has 9+ channels.
MATLAB Simulink: Can allegedly work with many different types of hardware from the same model and code from microcontrollers to DSP and FPGA but is absolutely unaffordable when I am no longer a student and would completely kill collaboration.
LabVIEW: Similar to Simulink, but the student edition is too restricted, so it is definitely not an option.
Sigrok: FOSS and the support for the DS1054z look nice if I go the multiplexed route but basically the same problem as with Saleae, only relatively expensive logic analyzers available for 9+ analog channels and nothing that could be integrated.
Separate ADC ICs: I did not find anything suitable.
ö:
I accidentally deleted the Wikipedia-Link in the brackets before posting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
@Mods feel free to put it in there and delete this post.
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