11/21/06 - UPDATE: Got an Email from Jim Jannard, just not about my offer to him about data recording technology - he's so far along now that my tech would be useless to him anyway I guess
In case you never gathered, one of the main people in the Charon project was me, Keith Wakeham. I conducted most of the research and development along with a significant financial and time investment into the project. The project being HDU-1, a direct to disk uncompressed HD recorder that was to offer significant recording time. This was going to be achieved through a pseudo raid setup using FPGA's as the glue logic between the CLC030/031 chips and the hard drives.
Several months of learning and testing with VHDL finally had PIO hard drive control completed and could write at 16.6 Mbytes/s (if drive was told to switch mode). At the time most laptop hard drives could barely do 20MBytes/s so it was found acceptable. However to get the 150MBytes/s needed for 10bit 4:2:2 HD meant 10 hard drives to be reliable - again considered acceptable (this would not be the case now). Due to border tariffs a Canadian PCB manufacturer with what looked like a reliable track record was chosen to make the prototype PCB's required for the shear number of IO. After poor communication for a month and no PCB it was decided to re-evaluate the project. 7200 RPM 2.5" hard drives had become available with writing speed's closer to 25MBytes/s (remember minimum speed was the only important thing, max and average were useless because that meant only a small portion of the drive could be used).
So we decided to develop for uDMA and see if we could use the development boards for the prototype. This took several months and encountered many problems because of issues between different drives. It was never fully completed though. Read's and Writes could be performed up to 66MBytes/s but the method the drives used to throttle transfers were not dealt with. As such when the drive requested to pause the transfer the FPGA didn't deal with it and would choke. This was April 2006.
Due to personal issues and school I decided to drop the project during his study semester between May '06 and August '06 and because of debt incurred from the project was unable to return to it in Sept '06 for his next 4 month work term.
The initial investors were interested in using the ADV202 Jpeg200 codec IC along with SD cards for storage but no serious development has come from this to date. The project is close to being abandoned.
I ams more of a proponent for uncompressed and utilizing existing tape based workflow. Such as using a flash based uncompressed recorder more as a deck rather than a data centric device to ensure compatibility and smooth the transition to data centric workflows. It also would keep existing people in the industry from seeing the device as a fragile computer.
On May 28 '06 an email was sent to Jim Jannard of the RED project which most of you are aware of, offering all my work free of cost with the hopes that he would accept and also develop HDU-1 in conjunction with the RED Raid system. As of now, Jim has not responded and not expected to respond.