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

Hi Eddie, 
 
Why you want kill a mosquito with a bazooka ?   
A fast SPI write engine require less than 500 LUT . You can use a 50$ FPGA starter board. 
 
Also I think that the sector-erase and block-write time  is the major cause of slow programming of SPI memory chip. Change clock from 20Mhz  to 100 Mhz do not obtain a great write-time gain.

-Alessandro

I don't agree with those video/wireless ideas. They are not realistic.

I will go for a high speed SPI/IIC Flash programmer. Most SPI/IIC programmers in the market are based on MCUs running below 24M. They are very slow for the big devices(like Spansion 128Mbit SPI Flash). With the help of FPGA, the clock can go above 100M easily.

Hi Alistair,

Nothing is impossible, it is just a matter of time

I may think of designing a loopback system which receives source video signal from one channel and sends the received video signal to the any other available channel. So, with this way, i can eleminate the use of secondary Cyclon kit.

I will seriously think about my project and make a final decision. Thank you very much.

Firat

Hey Firat,

We will be looking into August before we do the poll and possibly late August before it finishes, so one thing you have is time to decide, whether to cointinue, withdraw, or even change plans. So no need to stress at the moment. We have a good bunch of guys on the group, so I think you should be able to get help with decisions, prgramming, almost anything on the project. For extra equipment for the test, I may be able to help somewhat, but think an extra dev kit may be a bit much. I believe the Cyclone IV is the most expensive kit we have ever done.

I'm not sure if this would work but could you build either a TX or an RX and use a generic PC WiFi modem for the other half of the test?

Hi friends,

Elias,

When we face to numbers, those are just numbers, not reality of the life. I mean 600 MBit is not the troughput, just the available bandwidth. So it is impossible to reach the 600 MBit transfer rate.

Gordon,

Yes, you are totally right about this device has not a wireless peripheral. I noticed this, but i thought using fast IO ports to transfer data trough a wireless bridge. As you already noticed, I need two wireless bridges and sure two Cyclone IVs to achieve this project. And you are also correct that this kit is just a starter kit and needs changements it to be adopted to my project. There are lots of things to think about before starting such a project.

Alistair,

You are doing well. My first answer to your offer was just the idea itself. Sure it needed to be padded some information in detail. But, after reading other members's comments, i am thinking about rejecting my project. Because i am really too much busy and i don't know how much time i can be able to spare for this project. I don't want to be a member who receives the kit and does nothing. Off course, as far as i know myself, i will try to do my best but this may be not enough to give a life to this project. So, say lack of ability or lack of time, i don't want to be seen a person who abuses roadtest system. Thus, i feel a bit confused and do not know what to do.

Firat

Hi Gordon,

Looks like you are 100% correct, you'd need a bridge/module/modem for wireless. I'm not going to make any promises, but lets just see how things go and if there's anything we can do after the winner has been chosen by the group

To be honest, i think everyone is taking the competition a bit seriously. It is only intended as a bit of fun

Howdy,

Having reviewed Altrea's documents for the DK-Starter-4CGX15N, I'm not sure this falls under the category of a development kit or system.  Altrea calls it a starter kit and it may be hard to stretch it into a semi-functioning project.  That aside, Altrea does make some very good educational kit (as well as dev kits) and this may be another one.  It would be interesting to review it on that basis alone.

FYI:  Maybe I'm just confused, but this kit does not include any wireless interface.  The transceiver interface is through either an Ethernet port or a pair of low voltage differential (LVD) ports.

Cyclone IV GX Transceiver Starter Board

Regards,

Gordon Margulieux

Salem, OR USA

Hi Firat,

That sounds absolutely fine! I just wanted a little more information rather than a whole project plan. I like it myself. And If the members vote for you, I'm sure we can set up a place where you can keep us updated and get some help through the project.

Hi Carsten,

I will be nuetral. I do like Firat's idea, I just felt it should be padded out a little. I also think if we are going to vote for a candidate, we should be able to ask questions, not just me, all members.

I'm not sure how many choices we have in polls, if I get involved at all it would just be to cut down the number of entries to fit the poll...or we could maybe even do a knock out phase with the polls

Hi,

I think also what could be valuable is for other to propose projects that could be done with this kind of hw and to see if someone already has experience on such a project.

Or for people to propose previous projects done with MCU's that were limited by the latencies etc.

I really think this is a roadtest that people have to think together to find the most efficiet showing of how this product can be used more effectively than other FPGAs or MCUs and for that a project comparison would be the best.

For random ideas I had thought about before was a brushless motor controller that can do really high rpm as that usually requires very accurate timing and fast response time.

Elias

As a side-note regarding the idea of Firat (not trying to put it down or anything, just trying to offer more insight), the n-protocol does not attain anywhere near 600Mbit speeds unfortunately, usual dongle to router connection no matter what is the distance in real-life will be under 200Mbit handshake-speeds. Higher speeds might be attained in laboratory conditions. Although, if you could make a video transmitter that could do 600Mbit that would be quite nice

edit: George, I would like to hear more details about your idea. What kind of projector do you have in mind? Are you talking about a conventional wall projector type or?

Hi Alistair,

I like the idea that Firat came up with, and he is expressing the problem that we often have when wanting to participate. We can not garantee that it will come up with some thing  use full. But I think it would be nice to support him because of the energi and idealism that his letter expresses. It vwould be great to see what he can make whit that board. So I say support him. Please let us all learn from what he can get out of that board.

Yours sincerely

Carsten Doerwald