Capture of flying insects. I use a portable unit with 2 laserpointers for the detection of the flying insects. An second external mechanical shutter is used for superfast acces, because all the digital cameras have a long shutterdelay. Shutterdelay is the time between the command and the real execution of the foto.
All this is controlled by a portable hardware controller. The controller contain a Altera FPGA hardware chip where all the function are programmed. hardware is very fast and powerfull. Camera, external flashes, external shutter, laser scan and detectors, laserpointer for composition all the elements are driven by this controller. To make a foto, first the camera must by stay on by the controller. At this moment no light are entred because the second shutter is closed, but the camera stay in bulb mode and record black ( and some noise if the time is to long!)
Once a flying insect pass trought the 2 lasers, the controller open the second shutter into 5 msec and drive the flashes. The mechanical shutter have a T=1/500 sec but praktical this is 1/250. So the flash need to be fired into this short window. I have all the flashes actief at 6 msec after the laser detection. Camera, flashes all this is set manual.
I recently bought a DE0-nano FPGA development board, which I’m currently using to mine Bitcoins. It’s kind of a neat board, but one downside to it is that it uses linear regulators to provide the 1.2V core supply to the FPGA, and they’re incredibly inefficient at this. Only about 25% of the power supplied to them actually goes into the 1.2V supply; the other 75% is wasted as heat in the regulators. Since Bitcoin mining is very power-hungry, an awful lot of the power usage is in the 1.2V core supply and the regulators get really hot.
Fortunately, it’s possible to mod the board to use a more efficient external buck regulator to supply the 1.2 volts required by the FPGA core logic. (In theory this should even allow USB-powered mining; in practice this doesn’t seem to work for some reason.) If you look at the schematics, each of the main voltages on the board (ground, the supply voltage, 3.3V, and 1.2V) is brought out to a pair of pins on the 4-pin jumpers J5 and J6. There’s also a handy zero-ohm resistor across the input to the 1.2V regulator that can be removed to disable it.
DE0-Nano – Altera Cyclone IV FPGA starter board. For every day projects, microcontrollers are low-cost and easy to use. But when you have a project that needs raw power and high speed you may want to check out FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). FPGAs are like raw chips that you can design by hand. They run very fast and very efficiently. They are designed for mass-parallel execution so they’re very good at handling a lot of I/O pins at once, especially for real time video or audio or emulation applications.
FPGAs are also a lot of fun, in that you really get to play with how chips are designed. Unfortunately, we didn’t study FPGA’s in school and so we missed out on learning how to use them. When we saw this Altera starter pack, we thought it would be a great first FPGA board – compact but not ‘bare bones’ – at a great price! There’s no paper book included, but there is a very detailed Altera FPGA training curriculum that a student could use as part of a self-taught FPGA adventure.
The package comes with a single DE0 Nano development board, mini USB cable (you can program and power the module over USB) and two CDs with the software necessary to ‘compile’ and ‘upload’ code to the board. The software is available for Windows and Linux computers (no Mac)
The module itself contains a nice collection of accessories:
Steve has been do some prototyping for his home-built Mac on an Xilinx Spartan 3A FPGA board:
I’ve never been so happy to see a Sad Mac! A boot failure may not seem very exciting, but I’m thrilled that it’s actually doing something recognizably Macintosh-like. That means it’s actually running 68000 code from the Mac ROM, which is drawing stuff to the screen buffer, which is getting read by the video module and displayed to the VGA screen. From here it will be a long, slow road of implementing replacements for the VIA, SCC, IWM, and other components.
…
It’s trying to play a sound, too, by streaming some data through the sound buffer. With some more work to pull bytes from that buffer at 22 KHz, I could hear the glorious boot beep!
He plans on moving the project over to an Altera De1 dev board to get things going. The complete post can be found on Big Mess o’ Wires.
NEW PRODUCT – DE0-Nano – Altera Cyclone IV FPGA starter board. For every day projects, microcontrollers are low-cost and easy to use. But when you have a project that needs raw power and high speed you may want to check out FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). FPGAs are like raw chips that you can design by hand. They run very fast and very efficiently. They are designed for mass-parallel execution so they’re very good at handling a lot of I/O pins at once, especially for real time video or audio or emulation applications.
FPGAs are also a lot of fun, in that you really get to play with how chips are designed. Unfortunately, we didn’t study FPGA’s in school and so we missed out on learning how to use them. When we saw this Altera starter pack, we thought it would be a great first FPGA board – compact but not ‘bare bones’ – at a great price! There’s no paper book included, but there is a very detailed Altera FPGA training curriculum that a student could use as part of a self-taught FPGA adventure.
The package comes with a single DE0 Nano development board, mini USB cable (you can program and power the module over USB) and two CDs with the software necessary to ‘compile’ and ‘upload’ code to the board. The software is available for Windows and Linux computers (no Mac)
The module itself contains a nice collection of accessories:
Printable catalog (PDF)
FEED
