Post by Henosis SagePost by MaplinPost by wernertrpNo, he was a freelance writer of different articles.
I am a freelance writer in a.r.eckankar and and electronic engineer.
I teached myself with the age of 74 to programm FPGA's EP2C5T144C8.
FPGA's are very cool, they can do some amazing things. I love that you
can simply download a script for them and make it be a CPU, a video
encoder/decoder for H.264, or just about anything.
Did you start with Arduino first? As I am into RC (remote control) model
planes Arduino is great because you can easily assign Pulse Width
Modulation signals to the output pins to control servos. Then you need
only buy something like a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino board called a
Navi board, which has things like GPS, 6-axis accelerometer and
12-channel PWM for under $US 30, and you can run open-source auto pilot
software for drones, underwater ROV's, helicopters, fixed-wing planes
etc and make a fully autonomous, robotic aircraft.
Which I intend to do and win contracts to monitor the coast for sharks :)
And *then* you could add an FPGA board, a radio modem with a long range,
and make the FPGA encode hi-def video and encrypt it and transmit it
back to base and do all kinds of useful things which I am keeping to
myself while we are talking in public... while everyone else is
transmitting their video en clar in analogue format. Handy if you were
doing certain commercial work.
I wish I knew someone who knew a lot about designing optics systems with
lenses, prisms and beam splitters, and making them work with
multi-spectral cameras. And I wish I could buy a rifle and build a mount
for it controlled with the above gadgets, so I could have a remote
encoded video telescopic sight on it and aim it through an iPad. (I
wonder if I bought a laser range-finder with a digital display, could I
adapt that display to encode it for transmission back to my tablet?)
That's fascinating Maplin. I'm jealous, as I cannot do things like that. So, I wish you good luck.
Thank you so much, but the bad news is, I can't really do it either. Not
yet, anyway. I know what I *would* do, but there's a heck of a lot to
learn first to pull it off.
A friend of mine used an Arduino (for those who don't know, it's a
little programmable controller, you can make it control all sorts of
things and connect it to motors, servos, sensors for temperature,
pressure, voltage etc), and made a sight for roo shooting. He has a
joystick in his car and a bright spotlight on the roof, and he just
turns the joystick to rapidly move the spotlight around and up/down to
pinpoint the target. Usually you need a 2nd person as the "spotter", now
he can do it himself. I know this is a shock to some but for a lot of
farmers, kangaroos are little more than vermin, and they are definitely
not endangered. Arduino and similar are a great place to start and an
excellent teaching aid, suitable for smart school kids. You buy a
standard board with that chip on it and so many pins, and you write a
short script and upload it onto the board. The script tells it, pin 1
you be a voltage sensor, pins 2 and 3 I want you to output the codes to
control a stepper motor, pin 3 please route to the analogue-to-digital
converter and store the data in this place and format, and so on. Pretty
great stuff, perfect for controlling your reticulation, security system,
custom car accessories, hobby robotics, audio-visual stuff, you name it.
An FPGA is a Field-Programmable Gate Array. Like a super-Arduino on
alien growth hormones. They are *amazing* technology, all the more
amazing because you don't have to be a boffin to make it work. The
scripts are surprisingly simple, and many great cores and applications
are already there to download and use, all free and open-source.
What can they do? For example: Computer CPU's are made up of circuits
called logic gates, right? So, this is a gate array, but it's
field-programmable, ie out in the field you reconfigure it into whatever
you want. It has the hardware resources used to make advanced circuits,
such as CPU's, and all you need to do is download free, open source
scripts for it that are called "cores", and there are cores to make it
be a CPU, graphics encoder, radios and even more amazing stuff.
(Software-configurable radios are pretty damned amazing, I won't add
paragraphs explaining but worth a look on Wikipedia... and an FPGA can
be one). It tells the gates and elements on the chip to make
connections, in the right pattern so that they work like whatever device
you want. So they connect those gates in a grid, in any order and layout
you need, and the result works just the same as if you had a custom chip
designed and manufactured for a special purpose, only it can now be
changed for ANY purpose, in the field.
That means, you can get a standard circuit board with one of these FPGA
chips on it (the cheapest are under $10), and make it do these things
without having to have custom chips made at a cost of millions. They are
mass-manufactured for peanuts, and there are already many accessories to
go with them. But they also connect to standard parts like the display
from a mobile phone, or audio circuits, or video cameras, or computer
network gear, or engine management systems, you name it. Add storage and
memory and it can include a real computer (not just the CPU) with other
cores too. And if you're REALLY good, you design whole new cores, or
adapt portions of them into other ones. The bigger FPGA's have enough
resources on them that you can have several cores on the same chip, all
working together. You don't "burn" them in permanently, it loads up when
the machine is switched on like a computer loading a program. And yes,
then that CPU you just loaded *can* itself run programs, and do all
kinds of things. A truly wonderful little machine, the size of your
little fingernail.
But, while I know what they can do and what I'd like to do with them, I
haven't done what Werner has and actually learned to make them work. I
see myself more as the designer in a broad sense, and I'd like to work
with some hot-shot university graduate or something, who has the
hands-on experience in getting them working for my applications.
Well, you can see the potential out there these days. The wonder is that
these parts are cheap, kids can afford to learn on them. Imagine the
world we could make with this stuff in only 10 years. But, I suppose
it'll be like television, something that could have united and saved the
world but instead of course was just used to sell us detergent and
hamburgers. Like the internet ;) And of course, the criminals know about
them too....