original posted by Charles Jarvis on 25th August 2008

We got the Altera PCI dev kit in today, so work will start on that soon. So that said, here are some pictures of our projects in progress.



First is our new standalone development board. Across the top, you can see that it has USB input, Firewire input, Mic/Line IN/OUT, 2 RCA Video inputs, VGA output, an Ethernet connection, an RS-232 connection, and an SD Card input on the bottom of the board (not in picture). Most of these features won't be used in the courses here at Trinity, but if I have some downtime anytime soon, I plan to play around with alot of the fancier features, get them working, and document them.



Second is the model motor we will be using. As soon as our machine shop technician gets back from vacation next week, we will have a mount built so that a DC motor can be mounted to drive the crankshaft.



Third is the robot arm we have built. It has 5 DC motors to control it's movement: One at the base which allows almost 360 degrees of rotation, three at each joint on the arm, and one to control the clamp at the top. Sometime this week, we will begin to place sensors on there so that we can grab position measurements. On the bottom right is the logic and driver for one of the motors. The plan is to implement that logic in VHDL and put that on to our DE2, and put two more SN754410 chips on there so that we can control 5 motors easily.



Fourth is the Altera PCI Development kit we just got in today. One immediate hurdle we have to overcome is fitting this thing inside one of the OpenClient cases. It's physically too big to fit in the cases we have. Also, there is an extra set of "pins" (or whatever the proper name for the PCI connectors are) on the bottom right side of the board. This may be for PCI Express, but we'll have to research that before taking a saw to our equipment (These PCI dev kits are about $1000 each).