Xilinx and AMD aren't a good match. Xilinx has not been targetting the server market. They target custom embedded systems. (See DARPA challenge robots). Now that Altera is focusing on the server market and not on embedded, Xilinx can probably take over that entire space. It seems pretty clear that Altera(Intel) will dominate the server market, Xilinx will dominate the embedded market, Actel will dominate the space/irrational government contractor market, and Microsemi(Lattice) will remain largely irrelevant. At this point, I think the only thing that would change things is if one of these companies gets off their ass and open sources their toolchain so the community can make software support for these parts which isn't completely awful/unusuable.

Ok. What band it is on? What is it's signal strength? What size dish does that require given modern radio technology? Just because it is in a heliocentric orbit doesn't mean it is far away. The whole point is that it is close enough right now where we are picking up its carrier signal. From what I can tell from what I've read, they've just lost the ability to translate it. I don't have the report from NASA so I don't know what they did, and I'm not inclined to "just take their word". I'm certain some amateurs could pull it off with a little bit of hardware and some documentation.

I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'll put in 5k if someone can come up with a reasonable plan to talk with this spacecraft. You can find my contact info on my website http://ww.vxmdesign.com/contac... Email me if you have a detailed (hardware, software work) plan, or you want to up the bounty...

Yes, can someone explain WHY this is so expensive? It is distinctly possible that there is something I don't know about, but an SDR system under 2k. I'm sure it isn't the dish. Does it need some kind of insane amp that nobody has anymore and we can't rebuild? I can accept there is a reason it is expensive and that I don't know about, but I haven't seen an explanation yet. Hell, if there was a reasonable plan to build a system to talk to the spacecraft, I'd put in a few thousand to talk to talk to the spacecraft.

I worked on this program a few years ago. This doesn't shock me at all. It was a clusterfuck from beginning to end. OSC managers had no clue how to do software development on this kind of program. OSC is mostly a testament to value of lobbying over competence. This is also in line with how things have gone with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(satellite) Here is the really good one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DART_(satellite) Orbital science crashed two satellites trying something almost identical in 2005!

I have used, at one point or another, almost every type of embedded system there is. My company specifically targets clients with embedded needs and I solve those applications entirely in OSS (except for programmable logic, where OSS is not an option).

In the last few years, ARM has taken over the embedded world. It has solutions that span the entire range embedded problems, and it can be programmed entirely with the GNU toolchain. 8051s and PICs have been loosing dominance for years, and non-OSS toolchains have been declining in quality for years.

ARM has many different vendors and many different cores:

The smallest is the Cortex M-0. These come as small as 2.17x2.31 mm package made by NXP. This a 50 mhz processor with 12 io pins muxed with a few peripherals, and is between 1-4 dollars depending on quantity. There are many equally good and cheap Cortex M-0's.

If that does not quite cut it, you have Cortex M-3 series. There are MANY processors in this series. If you are looking for something good in this series, I would recommend the STM32 processors. There are many cheap and easy dev boards to get one of these processors up and running.

From here ARM just gets more and more powerful. Cortex A8 and A9 processors run at ghz now and run embedded linux. I have used these with linux with great results from Motorola, Atmel, TI (those these tend to require some effort) and Freescale. I have not yet had a chance to test the Exynos chips (this is up to quad core at 1.7 ghz) or the AllWinner chips.

All of these chips can be programmed with the gnu toolchain. The ones without linux os involve building the the gnu toolchain with the newlib library instead of the glibc/uclibc library. This is a bit of an involved process, but normally there are toolchains that are built and downloadable.

Further, any company that builds an ARM micro can be built with the gnu toolchain.

Also, never underestimate the power of attaching a small CPLD or FPGA to your application. That can drastically reduce the complexity of your software when done correctly.

I have used almost every toolchain and IDE at one point or another, and this has been *BY FAR* the most sustainable solution I have found.

Just because we don't understand how the F-1 engines were built, doesn't mean we do not understand how rocket engines are built. Why is NASA trying to reverse engineer an engine that was designed without modern computer aided design and without access to modern materials? Do they really think those engines were perfect and you can't possibly do any better? No, they seem to think they will "save money" by using the old design. How can it be easier to try and reverse engineer all the design requirements from an existing engine than to create a new design where you know the design requirements? This philosophy is why big aerospace is having such massive problems. This is why SpaceX has delivered supplies to the ISS twice, while the Antares rocket (Orbital Science Corporation) is still sitting on the ground. SpaceX designed their rockets from scratch, while OSC is using rockets designed in the 1960s.

Results from google tend to be dominated by high publicity things like the Raspberry Pi or company announcements, while the more obscure (but normally very useful) hardware offerings don't seem to make it in the search results.