I’m always on the lookout on Ebay for various pieces of engineering kit or hardware that may be useful for future projects. A couple of days ago I noticed an Altera HSMC SDI Video Daughter Card going for $60. Quite a bargain. Its a slightly cut down version of Alteras current design. These kinds of daughter boards usually cost $500 or so, so finding used h/w is a big saving.

Essentially its a Broadcast quality I/O device that when coupled with a HSMC capable Altera Dev Kit, such as the Cyclone V GT, you can build SDI or ASI Capture or Playback hardware designs.

Neat.

Altera include SDI logic in their MegaCore SDK and development kit, so building FPGA based hardware that is capable of video streams is pretty straightforward. I’ve worked on these kinds of projects in the past.

Hmm, perhaps time to whip up a quick PCIe SDI hardware capture project, and linux drivers for fun?