ervinpm said:
hi everyone!
I'm an electronics and communications engineering student, we are currently making our thesis project... our instructor approved our proposal entitled "TV tuner for PC." I am having trouble where to start. Can anyone suggest how will we be able to do this project?
The project requires a finished prototype. We were planning on using USB connection to make the tuner external but still we have no idea of how to do it. I hope that this forum can help us.
There are a number of very different problems here?.
1) Making a digitally tuned TV tuner, you need a tuner, an IF, demodulator etc.
2) The control of the tuner, this is normally done by I2C, so you need to receive the data from USB, read the bits you want, and set the tuner to the correct frequency via the I2C bus, remembering fine tuning, band switching, TV standard etc.
3) Converting the demodulated signal (video and audio) to digital.
4) Send the data to the PC via USB (bearing in mind you can't afford any lapses in communication, and USB is a polled system (no interrupts).
5) Write the PC program to run everything in the PC.
6) Write the microcontroller program to run everything on the tuner board.
It's certainly an interesting and challenging project, but the fact you've had to ask here before you start doesn't inspire me with confidence :lol:
It is, of course, completely impractical, as you can buy commercial units for hardly any money at all - I would imagine the parts will cost you something like ten to twenty times the cost of just buying one. But it's a Uni project, and cost isn't really the point!.
I'm presuming this is a group effort?, in which case you could set different members on different sections?. Personally I would work on building a working TV tuner section first, you could control it via I2C from a PC, in order to fully understand the control system required - feed it's output to a composite monitor, there's no point digitising it until you know you have a fully working tuner section.