XVGA over UDP

[AlbertCo]

I need o design XVGA to ethernet converter? A
device that accept data from UPD and display them of XVGA monitor

I need to make that based on FPGA and make it very cheap

 

[John_H]

I need o design XVGA to ethernet converter? A
device that accept data from UPD and display them of XVGA monitor

I need to make that based on FPGA and make it very cheap

I imagine you mean "UTP" which stands for Unshielded Twisted Pair such as
CAT-5 cables. Two devices I was recently are:

http://www.analog.com/en/content/0,2886,759%5F786%5F40373,00.html
and
http://www.analog.com/en/content/0,2886,759%5F786%5F67975,00.html

which give RGB video over CAT-5.

If you actually want to use ethernet rather than a dedicated cable, your
design goal may be too aggressive.

 

[John Larkin]

I imagine you mean "UTP" which stands for Unshielded Twisted Pair such as
CAT-5 cables. Two devices I was recently are:

http://www.analog.com/en/content/0,2886,759%5F786%5F40373,00.html
and
http://www.analog.com/en/content/0,2886,759%5F786%5F67975,00.html

which give RGB video over CAT-5.

If you actually want to use ethernet rather than a dedicated cable, your
design goal may be too aggressive.

Or maybe UDP, User Datagram Protocol.

This sounds like a heap-o-work.

John

 

[Phil Hobbs]

Or maybe UDP, User Datagram Protocol.

This sounds like a heap-o-work.

John

I have a very nice Ethernet-based daisychained KVM system for my Opteron
cluster. (It's made by, gasp, IBM.)

There's a box that sits behind the power bar on the rack, which has 4
Ethernet ports, each of which can have 6 servers daisy-chained on it. Nice
neat cabling, and it works over > 100 ft of cable if you want it to, and
works up to 1600 x 1280 or perhaps higher.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

 

[Mac]

I have a very nice Ethernet-based daisychained KVM system for my Opteron
cluster. (It's made by, gasp, IBM.)

There's a box that sits behind the power bar on the rack, which has 4
Ethernet ports, each of which can have 6 servers daisy-chained on it. Nice
neat cabling, and it works over > 100 ft of cable if you want it to, and
works up to 1600 x 1280 or perhaps higher.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

--Mac

 

[Deefoo]

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

--Mac

UDP is the OP's input, he doesn't have to worry about data rates, he just
has to display what's coming in. It's like a graphics card with an Ethernet
bus instead of a PCI (Express) or whatever.

Put a processor + Ethernet driver in the FPGA to handle the UDP/IP stack,
add an Ethernet chip and some memory for firmware and image buffer and use
what's left of the FPGA to get the data on the display. Make it GCC
compatible and most of the programming is done. See www.opencores.org for
more info. Any cheaper won't be easy since most of it is already for free.

--DF

 

[Nico Coesel]

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

You don't have to transfer all of it as a single stream. Most frames
will be identical. If you have a frame buffer at the receiver end,
you'll just update part of framebuffer for which you have new data.

The sender can be as intelligent as you want it to be.

 

[Rene Tschaggelar]

I need o design XVGA to ethernet converter? A
device that accept data from UPD and display them of XVGA monitor

I need to make that based on FPGA and make it very cheap

What does UDP mean ? Does it mean there is an
XWindow machine behind or does it just mean a
pixel generator. The first is vector based and
thus scalable and the second means dumb bitmaps.
The first is part of each Linux distribution.

Rene

 

[Phil Hobbs]

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

--Mac

Sure looks like it. I'm out sick today, but tomorrow I'll go look at
the manual. Really a nice gizmo. I'm not at all sure it ships raw
pixels at full bandwidth--which would be a putrid design choice for a
(relatively expensive) cluster KVM thingummy--and of course it only has
to ship the one it's actually displaying. There's a dongle for each
server, which has either PS/2 or USB keyboard and mouse connectors, and
a normal video connector. It also has an RJ45 plug and jack, for
daisy-chain purposes, and an Ethernet terminator at the end of the string.

With some not-too-intelligent compression and a dedicated Gigabit
Ethernet channel per chain, this is pretty doable, I think. I will have
to check to see if there are resolution limits, but it certainly works
at 1400x1050, because I use it that way all the time.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

 

[Mac]

[snip]

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

--Mac

UDP is the OP's input, he doesn't have to worry about data rates, he just
has to display what's coming in. It's like a graphics card with an Ethernet
bus instead of a PCI (Express) or whatever.

The OP said UPD, not UDP. He may have meant UDP (as John Larkin
suggested), and he may have meant UTP. Who knows?

In any event, the PCI bus can handle 33 MHz x 32 bit = 1,056,000,000 bits
per second. Of course, there is overhead, so that is a bit optimistic.

Fast Ethernet is 100 megabits per second. Not even close. So it has to be
gigabit Ethernet. But by today's standards, even gigabit isn't nearly fast
enough for a video bus. In fact, it hasn't been for some time. Just try to
find a high-end 32 bit 33MHz PCI video card.

Put a processor + Ethernet driver in the FPGA to handle the UDP/IP stack,
add an Ethernet chip and some memory for firmware and image buffer and use
what's left of the FPGA to get the data on the display. Make it GCC
compatible and most of the programming is done. See www.opencores.org for
more info. Any cheaper won't be easy since most of it is already for free.

I don't think you know what you are talking about. There would be no
reason for a processor. Just an FPGA. And what do you mean by GCC
compatible?

And why bother with all of this anyway? Just use X or remote desktop or
whatever. Remote display over IP is a solved problem if the remote
location is also a PC.

And if all you have is a keyboard, monitor, and mouse, there are long
distance KVM deals which (AFAIK) send analog video over UTP.

On the other hand, I have often thought about designing a board which
takes 480P in, digitizes it, and spits out UDP packets over gigabit
ethernet.

This would allow you to send a movie from a DVD player over the LAN to any
computer. I'm not aware of any design that does this. I guess to really be
useful, you would have to put the audio stream in there, too.

Keeping up with the UDP packet rate might be a pretty big job for the
receiving computer.

--DF

--Mac

 

[Deefoo]

[snip]

I have a very nice Ethernet-based daisychained KVM system for my Opteron
cluster. (It's made by, gasp, IBM.)

There's a box that sits behind the power bar on the rack, which has 4
Ethernet ports, each of which can have 6 servers daisy-chained on it. Nice
neat cabling, and it works over > 100 ft of cable if you want it to, and
works up to 1600 x 1280 or perhaps higher.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

--Mac

UDP is the OP's input, he doesn't have to worry about data rates, he just
has to display what's coming in. It's like a graphics card with an Ethernet
bus instead of a PCI (Express) or whatever.

The OP said UPD, not UDP. He may have meant UDP (as John Larkin
suggested), and he may have meant UTP. Who knows?

In any event, the PCI bus can handle 33 MHz x 32 bit = 1,056,000,000 bits
per second. Of course, there is overhead, so that is a bit optimistic.

Fast Ethernet is 100 megabits per second. Not even close. So it has to be
gigabit Ethernet. But by today's standards, even gigabit isn't nearly fast
enough for a video bus. In fact, it hasn't been for some time. Just try to
find a high-end 32 bit 33MHz PCI video card.

Put a processor + Ethernet driver in the FPGA to handle the UDP/IP stack,
add an Ethernet chip and some memory for firmware and image buffer and use
what's left of the FPGA to get the data on the display. Make it GCC
compatible and most of the programming is done. See www.opencores.org for
more info. Any cheaper won't be easy since most of it is already for free.

I don't think you know what you are talking about. There would be no
reason for a processor. Just an FPGA. And what do you mean by GCC
compatible?

I didn't notice the OP wrote UPD (he did write UDP in the subject) but
supposing UDP he will need some kind of processing to get the IP stuff done.
So put a processor IP in the FPGA for which a GCC cross compiler exist and
use all the open source network stuff to get the job done. See what I mean?
But if the OP means UPD I don't know what he is talking about.

And why bother with all of this anyway? Just use X or remote desktop or
whatever. Remote display over IP is a solved problem if the remote
location is also a PC.

Why bother is not my problem.

<snip>

--DF

 

[Meindert Sprang]

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?
Probably UTP based. I've worked with KVM switches that used standard UTP
cables but this had nothing to do with UDP or any form of digital
communications. The UTP cables were simply used to transfer the analog video
signal (RGB and sync) over 4 pairs in the UTP cables. So the maximum
bandwith is then 1600 x 1200 x 70fps = 135MHz.

Meindert

 

[Mac]

On Mon, 03 Apr 2006 20:20:49 -0400, Phil Hobbs wrote:
[snip]


I have a very nice Ethernet-based daisychained KVM system for my Opteron
cluster. (It's made by, gasp, IBM.)

There's a box that sits behind the power bar on the rack, which has 4
Ethernet ports, each of which can have 6 servers daisy-chained on it.
Nice
neat cabling, and it works over > 100 ft of cable if you want it to, and
works up to 1600 x 1280 or perhaps higher.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Are you sure it is Ethernet based?

To get 1600 x 1200 (probably not 1280) you need:

1600 x 1200 x 24 bits x 70 fps = 3,225,600,000 bits per second.

Yes, it could be compressed, and it could be less than 70 fps, but
even so, you are talking about a lot of digital BW. Even gigabit might
not be up to it for 1600 x 1200.

--Mac


UDP is the OP's input, he doesn't have to worry about data rates, he just
has to display what's coming in. It's like a graphics card with an Ethernet
bus instead of a PCI (Express) or whatever.

The OP said UPD, not UDP. He may have meant UDP (as John Larkin
suggested), and he may have meant UTP. Who knows?

In any event, the PCI bus can handle 33 MHz x 32 bit = 1,056,000,000 bits
per second. Of course, there is overhead, so that is a bit optimistic.

Fast Ethernet is 100 megabits per second. Not even close. So it has to be
gigabit Ethernet. But by today's standards, even gigabit isn't nearly fast
enough for a video bus. In fact, it hasn't been for some time. Just try to
find a high-end 32 bit 33MHz PCI video card.

Put a processor + Ethernet driver in the FPGA to handle the UDP/IP stack,
add an Ethernet chip and some memory for firmware and image buffer and use
what's left of the FPGA to get the data on the display. Make it GCC
compatible and most of the programming is done. See www.opencores.org for
more info. Any cheaper won't be easy since most of it is already for free.

I don't think you know what you are talking about. There would be no
reason for a processor. Just an FPGA. And what do you mean by GCC
compatible?

I didn't notice the OP wrote UPD (he did write UDP in the subject)

Oops. You're right. So he probably did mean UDP.

but
supposing UDP he will need some kind of processing to get the IP stuff done.

Oh. UDP is simple enough so that you don't really need a full stack. I
think an FPGA could handle it without resorting to a processor and full
stack.

So put a processor IP in the FPGA for which a GCC cross compiler exist and
use all the open source network stuff to get the job done. See what I mean?

It's not just GCC. If you want to take advantage of open source network
stuff, you need a fully supported platform with standard libraries, a
kernel, and so on. And you need a boot loader of some sort.

Then you have to watch out that the licensing is compatible with your
intended use.

But if the OP means UPD I don't know what he is talking about.


Why bother is not my problem.

True. You're not the OP! ;-)

<snip>

--DF

regards,
Mac