If you had a Altera Cyclone IV Dev Kit, what would you build?

Well, here's my idea...

A couple of years ago I bought a pair of broken HP Laserjet III printers for scrap. One had a blown laser, the other had a fried power supply and a thick coating of disintegrated air filter all over its innards. I stripped them for spares, and the spares ended up in my "Quality Used Parts" box.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm running a photo-lab at work (think "One Hour Photo"). The machine we're using is a Fuji Frontier, a massive hulk of a machine which uses three lasers to expose a sheet of photo paper, then processes it in RA-4 chemistry to produce a print. On one particularly slow day, I started thinking: what if I took the laser scanner off the Laserjet, bolted on a 405nm BluRay laser diode (instead of the infra-red diode the LJ3 uses as-standard), and used black and white photo paper (which is VERY sensitive to blue light). Could I build my own B&W printer (though obviously without the process chemistry -- I'd do the processing using developing trays)?

This would involve:

  - Sending analog data (~12 bits per pixel) to the laser at around 30MHz

  - Keeping the scanner motor running at a fixed speed within a decent tolerance

  - Transferring data to/from a host PC or an SD Card

  - (possibly) JPEG decoding

  - LUT processing (applying a lookup table to the data sent to the laser in order to correct the black and white points)

  - Keeping track of where the sheet of paper is in the mechanism, and driving the three stepper motors accordingly

No doubt there would be a lot of "fun" involved in making this work on a commercial MCU. In the LJ3, most of this sort of work was done by a set of microcontrollers and ASICs...

Still, looks like a fun project. And definitely a candidate for a "weirdest project" award

Hi Phil,

Sounds very interesting. The weirder the idea, the better in my opinion. Use Lego and felt tip pens like this guy and you have my vote!

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RE: If you had a Altera Cyclone IV Dev Kit, what would you build?

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@Alistair: "The weirder the idea, the better in my opinion. Use Lego and felt tip pens like this guy and you have my vote!"

I was going to use Meccano, stepper motors and a couple of off-the-shelf gears (if I can find somewhere that still sells such things). Unfortunately the current iteration of Meccano has been kiddie-proofed and turned into some nasty plastic monstrosity... Thankfully there's still model shops, tin plate and ebay, though I reckon I'll be buying a Proxxon MF70 micro-mill quite soon. Oh look, it's a Farnell standard stock item that's in stock at Maybrook. How about that

As for the felt-tip pens -- the laser scanner produces a horizontal line by bouncing the laser off a rotating polygonal mirror (think: pentagon with mirrored sides, strapped to a brushless DC motor). Obviously this means the 'line' is only a line because persistence-of-vision makes it look like that; it's actually a scanning spot. So you just turn the laser on and off to produce black and white art.

... but I want 300DPI 8-bit grey-scale printing, hence the photographic paper (silver-halide coated) and chemicals. The Frontier does a reasonable job of printing B&W, but because it's a colour process (and inherently imperfect) there's always a colour cast to the prints, and it can't go all the way to a 'perfect' black. Silver halide is the old technology; you have black, white and... that's it. So the only thing you really have to worry about is linearising the grey-scale ramp and calibrating the laser.

The hard parts are going to be (roughly in order): the analog circuitry, the optical alignment and the beam focussing. Any tiny bit of overshoot on the LD current controller is likely to kill the diode, screwing up the optical alignment will defocus the beam (or mis-position it), and I'm still trying to figure out how to get the laser spot down to around 1/300 of an inch.

Good fun...

Phil et al,

These sound like great ideas, but I can't see how they'd fit around a Cyclone IV ?

It has very limited i/o in it's standard form and to get enough analog / digital interfaces onto it you'd need to build almost as much hardware again and attach it to the Express connector. (Unless I have missed something in the spec!).

One other thing we should bear in mind with this kit (and please someone correct me if I am wrong) is that as-shipped the transceiver is connected to the Ethernet PHY interface, and requires microsurgery on microscopic SMD components to move the transceiver to the SMA connectors.

There is another transceiver connected to the Express connector - but to interface to that would require some pretty advanced logic - or bung it in a suitably equipped PC and write some low level device drivers for it!

Phil et al,

These sound like great ideas, but I can't see how they'd fit around a Cyclone IV ?

It has very limited i/o in it's standard form and to get enough analog / digital interfaces onto it you'd need to build almost as much hardware again and attach it to the Express connector. (Unless I have missed something in the spec!).

One other thing we should bear in mind with this kit (and please someone correct me if I am wrong) is that as-shipped the transceiver is connected to the Ethernet PHY interface, and requires microsurgery on microscopic SMD components to move the transceiver to the SMA connectors.

There is another transceiver connected to the Express connector - but to interface to that would require some pretty advanced logic - or bung it in a suitably equipped PC and write some low level device drivers for it!

That'll teach me to skip ahead!

I didn't realise this was a PCIe dev board. In which case, my Altera DE1 board is probably FAR more suitable as a dev platform for the printer.

Going by the specs for the board, the only things that are coming to mind are "Ethernet controller" and... well... "Ethernet controller." Seems like a bit of a one-trick pony to me.

Phil,

I've read through the getting started guide and the reference guide for that board a few times now, and am racking my brains for a good use for it.

The best I've came up with so far is programming it to play a networked game of PONG on it's LCD, with two players connected via telnet!

I'm not mocking the device at all - it has Gb ethernet, FPGA and CPLD along with a MAX processor for JTAG debugging - we just need to think a bit laterally and come up with something better than just measuring the BER on it's tranceiver

I think I'll start by looking at what Blocks are available for it and see if something jumps out at me from there. 

-Kenny