Hi there everyone,
I want to apologize for the question that i am keeping as generic as possible in order not to hurt the sensitivity of the very elite people that are surely reading.
I am yet-another humble self-taught student of unix/asm/tcpip etc., with no experience in electronics, but with an idea to develop and eventually, possibly, turn into a hardware device.
The technologies employed would be RF and USB. Basically the data (not more than 512 Bytes) acquired via USB (maybe like a mass-storage key) should be transmitted/received via RF to other similar devices, in a form of 1-to-1 communication (not a meshed-type of network or anything alike).
Since I know nothing about electronics design I started looking at hardware right away and, after reading suggestions and hints all over usenet and i found this chip to do (maybe?) everything i want (CC1010 from chipcom.com). It's a SOC, but I just oriented myself to it because it's a bit "higher" level so it's more understandable/easy for me.
I started with opensource and then "corporate-I.T." taught me to find "solutions" (like the SOC), but i can sense this is a wrong/expensive approach especially in electronics. Though I dont want to ask the question if a SoC is better than putting parts together, cause it will turn probably into a flame (like "CISC vs. RISC" for CPUs). Everywhere there are tradeoffs.
Thus...if anyone, along with his very-welcomed suggestions about hardware, could point out the proper way to approach the development of an electronic-design project, i would really appreciate it.
In short words...instead of looking at hardware first, I can even look at RFCs...but it's impossible for me to choose the parts (PICs? FPGAs?...) and arrange them together to make the technology that i want to use.
I'd like to learn what's the proper way to go about this (by the way...i can't go to .edu).
Thank you all for your patience and time.
Gio