Week 2 Progress:
We met with a TA on Tuesday night and described to him our three main ideas. I came up with another idea of having a car with infrared on all sides to have it drive by itself. It would be powered by the Palm and will make the car move in the direction based upon how close the car is from the railings. We would also be able to program the car to go a specific route (like some cm. left then right etc.). The TA liked this idea because it is more applicable to the real world and satisfies most of the requirements of this course. The only thing was that it was based on the Robot Project (see link from last week). We would be using some pre-made chips to realize this project. The professor did not like this idea as well but approved the idea of the Digital Logic Analyzer. This will be the project that we will make for this course because it can always be transformed into something "cool" later on a device to light up a dark room.
This week we went over some of the design and researched the necessary parts. We decided to use a Digilent Development Board with an FPGA chip that we will program using the VHDL tool similar to the one in ECE132L. Other parts necessary are still undetermined because we are not really sure of everything that is involved for this project. The timing would be a difficult aspect that we would have to realize. There are different states to the Logic Analyzer like idle, data acquisition, configure, etc. We decided to keep the project affordable and use a Palm because the development board is already expensive.
Ilya is doing more research of the parts involved while Jae is gathering Orcad and VHDL for programming of the chip. I set up the palm emulator and CodeWarrior R6 on my laptop and am going through the tutorial. I should have some screen captures of the user interfaces and some code description for Week 3. This week I also re-made my web page and added project description. We will be assisting each other on every aspects of this project and will update you on any findings.