Moving forwards

So, quite a lot of excitement the last few days, thank you everyone for your comments here and at all the sites that picked up on the project post. It was nice to hear back from so many of my fellow geeks, with mostly words of praise and encouragement. I'll probably post a screenshot of the site statistics later showing the great leap in hits, but for now I wanted to talk about some other stuff going on.


I am now done with my junior year at Clarkson, I turned in my last assignment a few hours ago and things are slowing down. I intend to have dinner with some good friends tonight, since I will not be seeing them for the summer, or perhaps longer (KC9OPU I'm looking at you!) and then tomorrow morning I have more stuff to take care of.


Speaking of, tomorrow will hopefully be the day we sign a lease for an apartment in Rome, we're renning a little shy on time and I'm getting nervous we won't find a place in time for our May 18th Start Date at AIS. That would be a shame because I'm very excited for that job and want to start as soon as possible. The job itself is going well as far as I can tell, all my paperwork has been submitted and the ball is rolling on my security clearance. Soon I should have my temporary clearance, so a more thorough investigation can be launched to get my permanent clearance.


In other news, Doug and Allen and I have been discussing some interesting possibilities for continuing the work on our project, and we might just surprise everyone this summer :) Keep a watch out here.


Also I've decided that I'm sick of moving the cable for my stereo between computers, and I need a project to build before I go nuts, so I sketched up a simple mixer circuit for two audio inputs with volume control for each channel, I will be ordering the parts and playing with it soon, but right now the component values aren't even in place. Here is a preliminary schematic, and I'd like to say, I may have been half asleep when I designed the power supply, since there's no reason for it to have an op-amp in it, when I could just use a 7805 as a friend suggested. So that's probably getting updated, but here is what I have so far:

And just for the fun of it, here is the PCB layout, also in progress:

So this project seems like it could be fun, it'll be pretty cheap and it's been a while since I built anything in the analog domain, mostly I do digital stuff, it's way easier... for me anyway :)

That's about all for now, catch you later.

Final Project!

EDIT: I didn't expect this post to become remotely interesting to anyone else :) So I'm just adding in some details at the bottom before the photos.

Yesterday was presentation day for our final projects for EE316, Computer Engineering Junior Lab. It was an open ended project and my group was Allen, Doug and I. We decided to use the DE2 FPGA board to make a video game console that promotes exercise. This means that they were no controllers. Using an Axis network camera, we track the player by color and feed that information from the processing PC to the board using the JTAG UART. The game, which ended up being Space Invaders instead of the originally planned Breakout, was written to run on the 'GamerII' game engine that I wrote for the system. The system consisted entirely of the Nios II softprocessor, SDRAM for code execution, the GPU (which was written in VHDL by Doug!) and the SRAM the GPU uses as video memory. Allen wrote the game using my API, and he did it pretty fast, so I'm pretty proud of that. The software is all in C++ and the Hardware defined by VHDL, or actually hardware. Meaning we did build stuff, Doug built a nice conditioning circuit to interface an optical oxygenation sensor to a LEGO NXT brick for processing, which determined the heart rate by timing the period between beats, then transmits that over bluetooth to the computer doing the image processing, so the heart rate is included in the packed of data sent to the game. The game can then use the heart rate to vary game speed and difficulty, in concept. We didn't get to implement that feature fully, it simply displays on the screen. But, theoretically it works, the framework is in place, just not the control code. Plus, it turns out Space Invaders is even harder in person!

Other EDIT: I figured those readers from Hack A Day and Engadget might be interested in some more details, so I'm adding some stuff here. For starters, in case I didn't already mention it, I'm a junior Computer Engineer at Clarkson University, up in Potsdam, NY. The entire game system was implemented on a Terasic DE2 development board which is housing an Altera Cyclone II FPGA, the system itself was built with Quartus II, and the SOPC builder, using several University IP cores along with the Nios II soft processor. The VGA hardware was built by Doug and controlled by a SOPC Builder PIO port, several actually. Just some stuff I thought you'd like to know :).

Photo time:

The game running on the projector screen, with the camera below it.

The heart rate monitoring circuit with the NXT controller, and the DE2 visible.

And finally a video of Allen playing the game:

Its hideous!!

This is our heart rate monitoring circuit for the final lab project.
Sketchy but will work.

Been buuuusy!

Hey everyone. Its been very busy lately, very very busy. Sorry I haven't updated. I'm in the midst of several final projects, studying for final exams and other stuff. Like finding an apartment for the summer, since I was offered (and accepted) an internship at Assured Information Security. (http://www.ainfosec.com) I'm actually on the way there now, sitting in the passenger seat posting this from my BlackBerry. My friend, new coworker and roommate Matt Franklin is driving. We're going to take care of some paperwork regarding employment and security clearance. Then we're going out to survey a few apartments to see what we have to work with. Officially I start work May 18th, so I don't have much time to move in and get settled. It's sure going to be an interesting summer!

But we're not *quite* there yet, so here's the rundown. The big project on deck is of course for junior lab. I'm working with my current roommate, Allen, and a friend from the FIRST team, Doug. We got to pick our project, he gave us a couple suggestions but we ignored it and went way over the top. Using an Altera/Terasic DE2 development board, housing a Cyclone II FPGA, and the Nios II soft-processor we built a video game console. But ours is cooler than most because it has no controllers. A web cam attached to a PC is calibrated to track the players motion, and then the player actually moves around and runs/jumps to play games. Doug developed the image tracking software and the VHDL graphics accelerator hardware. I developed the game engine and the SD Card 'cartridge loader' and Allen is writing the game code. It also incorporates a wireless heart rate sensor so the game can scale in difficulty and speed according to an exercise profile/target heart rate. All in all, it is almost done, due Thursday. Everything big works, just debugging the game and heart rate monitoring stuff. We should hit the date with everything working. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about embedded systems design in the process. I definitely enjoyed the project.

I have three final exams, which is a lighter load than previous semesters because of the fact most of my classes are design project oriented this semester. Then the moving frenzy begins!!

Speaking of, I got a nice Townhouse apartment on campus next semester, with Matt, Steve Deyo and Ryan D. I'm happy about that too.

Let's see.... The pictures in the previous two posts were from an adventure in the apartment of Greg Linder. I needed to suck less at soldering so he 're-taught' me using a little motor PWM driver kit he had laying around. He also pawned a lot of miscellaneous crap off on me. And he's trying to get me to take a behemoth computerized HP oscilloscope. I want it, really badly, it's so cool!

But.. It IS a behemoth. It really is huge. I can't even find a place to cram it temporarily. So it may get sacrificed. I'm gonna try to find a way to make it work, I promise.

Well that's enough for now. Watch for more updates!

It works!!!

We found the world's coolest potentiometer in Greg Linder's apartment and hooked up this DC brush motor up. Its fun to play with :)

I built stuff today!

I took a break from school work to build this little motor driver kit so Greg Linder could teach me how to not fail at soldering.

Sorry!

I did it again, I've been barely able to keep up with Twitter the last half month or so, coming back from break has been really exciting. All kinds of stuff has happened. For starters, immediately after returning from break, I had a job interview at Assured Information Security for an intern position this summer, I should be getting an answer back from them shortly. There's been a lot of school work, lot of labs and plenty of exams to keep me busy. I've also been helping my friend Matt Sleeper at Theater...Theatre...one of them. Mostly handing stuff to people and putting screws in to things, but still fun stuff. I'll be uploading a ton more pictures later when I do a more detailed post.