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

@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, how about a 3D laser printer for acrylic cubes

So you would have 2 or 3 lasers that form a dot when all are aimed to the same spot but that they are not hot enough to do anything individually.

Elias

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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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 Elias,

I am still working on the details and haven't thought about prediction algorithms yet.

Just to start with, the live market data will be pulled from google/yahoo finance website.

-Lakshmi

Hi "blakme",

As this is a product that is best suitable to be used with a PC as a card I think your project sounds very interesting.

Where would the data itself come in from?

Have you thought about some prediction algorithms?

Elias

I am an experienced FPGA design engineer and have used Xilinx, Altera & Lattice FPGAs in various projects.

Given a chance, I would like to build an accelerator on the Aletra board to monitor hundreds of stocks Real-Time.
User should be able to set various conditions on the individual or group of stocks to monitor. The accelerator
would provide real-time trigger/notification to the host when the conditions are met.

I'm currently starting my phd on buildings comfort and energy efficiency improvement. In order to accomplish the established goals I will have to implement Artificial Intelligence algorithms at different devices (Microcontrollers, FPGA's, PC's) and test it's performance/cost relation.

So if I win this RoadTest I will use the Kit for building an application with the following topics:

-Remote and Local acquisition of Temperature, Humidity, CO2, et. sensors;

-Control Building appliances;

-Heavy artificial intelligence algorithms performance tests;

-Web-services applications;

Of course, the developing of this project will take some time, but I will post every update on the developing status of the developed applications.

i would like to try out some soft core microcontroller projects that have been developed, a high speed data capture application..

cheers