Like the title says, I’d like to hop on a new project. A few thoughts:
- I don’t think I’m going to continue with the stack processor. Mainly, I don’t think I will learn much, other than how to get really frustrated at very little functionality. So I’ll pass up on that.
- The RainDance/Sprinkler controller is still asking for a last few hours of wrap-up/polish, and I will do that before I really sink my teeth into a new project.
Now, to the new project… I’m a student now, so I don’t want to spend a lot on building a hardware prototype or anything. But here’s what I have at my disposal right now:
- NetBurner dev board (a ColdFire controller with an ethernet port and a bunch of peripherals)
- PIC Dem2 Plus dev board
- SitePlayer dev board
- Xilinx FPGA dev board
- A laptop with a CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU
- Student version of Matlab and LabVIEW
So, some thoughts about the actual project:
- I COULD re-implement the RainDance stuff on the NetBurner, just for fun. But mainly that would consist of slapping together existing RTOS, TCP/IP, Webserver, etc. packages for this processor. I may do it yet, but I’m not sold on it, really.
- I was considering implementing a system from the ground up on the ColdFire using FORTH. Basically, write a low-level boot loader thing and a basic interrupt handler in assembly, and on top of that do everything in FORTH, all the way up to … well, realistically, up to the point I get bored, but in theory up to a working TCP/IP stack and webserver.
- I’ve been studying control theory this semester, and something in that realm might be interesting, but I can’t think of a good application. Maybe something with a dsPIC (which I don’t have, but if there’s a really interesting application, I’m sure I could scrounge up a dev board somewhere). One thought was a regulated power supply of some sort.
- Some sort of DSP application – I have labview/matlab and the NVIDIA CUDA (massively parallel processing) available, so something where I can process large amounts of data (video/image processing, for example) might be neat. But it would definitely require a lot of reading/learning on my side. But still, something I’d like to get into.
So, thoughts? suggestions?