Transmitting SDI Signals from an Arduino | Hacker News Reader

Transmitting SDI Signals from an Arduino

github.com

49 pointszdw10 comments

Just in case you were wondering

Serial digital interface (SDI) is a family of digital video interfaces first standardized by SMPTE (The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) in 1989. For example, ITU-R BT.656 and SMPTE 259M define digital video interfaces used for broadcast-grade video. A related standard, known as high-definition serial digital interface (HD-SDI), is standardized in SMPTE 292M; this provides a nominal data rate of 1.485 Gbit/s.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface

Ah thanks, I was wondering which SDI it was and I was pretty sure it wasn't the Strategic Defense Initiative :)

Though secretly I was hoping to communicate with top secret killer satellites from the 80s obviously! My world domination plans will have to wait :'(

For those interested in toying around with SDI: Blackmagic Design (the same company that made the Video Assist monitor pictured in this repository's README.md) also makes an SDI shield for Arduino that can be used to inject stuff into the SDI bitstream [1].

Additionally, if you take one of their Micro Converters apart, they're nothing more than a (powerful) FPGA and SerDes units for HDMI / SDI.

[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/developer/product/arduin...

Pretty much every BMD product is FPGA based, either with a conventional FPGA or a hybrid like Zynq (ARM cores + FPGA). It clearly gives them a lot of design commonality in hardware and flexibility in behavior. It's a good example that you can still have a large range of products at low cost (compared to the rest of the industry) while leveraging fairly expensive generic parts (compared to ASICs).

The blackmagic arduino sheild does not actually produce SDI video, it only allows you to insert out of band control data. If blackmagic were to release the FPGA firmware you could add the same capability that author did (hardware is essentially the same), but as it is you would still need a SDI video source such as the micro converter that you mentioned, and a HDMI test pattern generator to feed the converter.

Associated article, probably a more interesting link: https://blog.tempus-ex.com/pro-video-with-arduinos-an-intro-...

this is more, "transmitting SDI signals from a GS2962 driven by an FPGA with some high-level control by an Arduino". An AVR chip isn't going to blast out 1080p30 out of its GPIOs any time soon.

The notion that an Arduino has to be (just) an AVR chip is wrong though. The board in question here is an Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 (which doesn't even contain an AVR chip, the SAMD21 is a 32bit ARM Cortex M0) and you also have the Arduino 101 which has a x86 Intel Quark microcontroller. Most of the new Arduino products are using 32 bit ARM processors now.

But Arduino (the company) is _most_ famous for their use of the atmega-based products, and "Arduino" (the word) is often used synonymously with those specific products (and often specifically meaning the Arduino Uno). Their non-atmega products are a newer and less popular development. I'm sure that over time "Arduino" (the word) will be used less and less to mean one of their atmega products, but for a lot of people, "Arduino" still means "board with an atmega328p".

I would personally hazard the guess that for a significant portion of the people who use Arduino, it just means any board that is programmed in the Arduino framework. They have no real idea about or connection to the hardware that is running their code.

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