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

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 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

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

cheers

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 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.

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

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