Lime wants a Raspberry Pi for RF
The company has provided all the schematics and documentation for the board for an open source project called Myriad-RF, and is looking for partners to make more boards to bring the cost down. The board is currently made by Taiwanese distribution partner Azio but costs $300.
"The first and foremost reason for doing this is we found there are a lot of people out there doing interesting stuff in R&D and education and if you want to provide them a platform you need a community around it," said Ebrahim Busherhi, CEO of Lime. "Raspberry Pi for RF is precisely our intention," he said. "Such an approach has not been done in the RF domain to our knowledge and we want to follow the same model." This will bring the price of boards down and open up new applications, he says, similar to the open source hardware approach taken by Freescale Semiconductor with its $12 Kinetis microcontroller board.
The Myriad-RF non-profit initiative aims to give both hobbyists and experienced design engineers a range of low-cost RF boards and free design files available for general use. The boards use field programmable RF (FP-RF) transceivers to operate on all mobile broadband standards – LTE, HSPA+, CDMA, 2G – including all regional variants; and any wireless communications frequency between 0.3 and 3.8 GHz. This includes the regulated, licensed bands and unlicensed / whitespace spectra.
Lime has also beta-launched the Myriad-RF community website and forum, www.myriadrf.org. This resource will also house the board design files and example projects with how-to guides and the ability for users to contribute extra content.
Designs hosted on myriadrf.org will initially come from Lime and close partners, but Lime seeks to increase involvement and design contribution from the general RF design community – both hobbyists and professional system designers.
"Innovation only really happens when a large number of minds tackle a problem, and by going open-source we can slash the hardware costs and open RF innovation up to as many people as possible," said Busherhi. "We’re trying to create an Arduino for the RF sector; a board that’s low cost, powerful, exceptionally flexible and easy to use. And, most importantly, we’re trying to let the community determine what’s required, letting them add the functionality they need."
A distribution network is already in place for pre-built boards and components with Azio Electronics and Eastel already on board. Links to all available pre-built boards can be found on the Myriad-RF board pages.
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