During the past week we tried to figure out some details about our project, mainly about which technologies to use, come up with the structural schemas and so on. Sargon had a very concrete idea in his mind, so he started with his explanation to the rest:
In the end we created the following block schema:
The most dominant part of the solution is the microprocessor. We have decided to go for LPC1343 and we'll develop using LPCXpresso development board. The board is connected to computer via USB cable (probably using HID). It reads analog inputs from the shields using AD converters or binary inputs using IO pins. Output of the board uses again IO pins, but we can also generate simple waveforms using DDS routed using switches to operational amplifiers.
We also started to work on the control software that runs on the computer. This will use Python and Qt library for GUI. This will allow us to create truly multiplatform solution running not only on Windows but also on Linux and Mac OS X. We also setup a source code repository which is now: https://github.com/brmlab/edubrm.
The key challenges for us right now are understanding of how LPC1343 works, especially its USB communication and also if we'll be able to read and process readings from it effectively.