Hardware

Panda in a Tree: or, where to GoogleEARTH
EA board
2011 testbed for graphical display adaptations with Google Earth. although in image manipulation programs several Open Source applications address the creation and editing of the image format, perhaps the OMAP display properties can permit works in cartographic format. where technical drawing and engineering plans cover some of the image-format application, land maps with features and topological overlays would also utilize load processing of intense data streaming. camera offloading, scanner image lifting are other tasks that might adapt to the TI platform.

After a Successful extension of TI's ARM Cortex-M3 LM3S9B92 MCU with a FPGA as a Memory Controller Hub and Data Acquisition platform, I'm about to try and do the same work for the PandaBoard!

This Project will convert almost any kind of unsupported / expensive / or "hard to get you hands on" device for the PandaBoard with the Academic $59 DE0-Nano FPGA development board.
Five main interfaces are the main objectives:

1. Memory Mapped GPMC Slave - Half way there (TI's Cortex-M3 EPI is just like the GPMC)
2. CSI-2 Transmitter Core - All relevant specifications obtained!
3. Multi-CMOS/CCD Interfaces Controller - LVDS/Parallel.
4. DAC/ADC controller - Done!
5. Memory Mapped Stub Interface - for your generic needs (GPIOs, SPI, I2C, CF, etc) - Done!

While most of us are trying to get our hands on some decent MIPI CSI-2 CMOS/CCD sensor for our OMAP4 based board I'm going to take it a step further and build a complete FPGA based interface for both of the GPMC and CSI-2 interfaces with the $79 ($59 Academic) Terasic's DE0-NANO Development kit.

The bonus of using this FPGA development kit is that is has:
1. ADI ADXL345, 3-axis accelerometer with high resolution (13-bit)
2. NS ADC128S022, 8-Channel, 12-bit A/D Converter
3. 32MB SDRAM

It can run a soft 32bit processor (NIOS II) with ANSI C.

Early availability of the Verilog FPGA core for the GPMC, based on Altera's Avalon-MM Slave are available!

I'm short of a working PandaBoard (my friend's board was damaged by my evil cup of coffee).

I'm in need of some other parts like:
1. Misc CCD/LVDS sensors.
2. Power ICs, LDOs, Regulators
3. Step motors and motor drivers.
4. Other FPGA development board for testing and verification.

Most of all I need people that are willing to co-work on the Linux & FPGA development.

Contact me:

Oded2.4@gmail.com

A Class driver is a type of hardware device driver that can operate a large number of different devices of a broadly similar type. Class drivers are very often used with USB based devices, which share the essential USB protocol in common, and devices with similar functionality can easily adopt common protocols. Instead of having a separate driver for every kind of device, a class driver can operate a wide variety of devices from different manufacturers. To accomplish this, manufacturers make their products compatible with a standardized protocol. A class driver is used as a base or ancestor class for specific drivers which need to have slightly different or extended functionality, but which can take advantage of the majority of the functionality provided by the class driver.
In this Project we intend to build Panda Class driver for USB Web Camera, Thumb Scanner and USB Storage Device for Community supported Texas Instrument OMAP 4430 based Panda Board.

Expected Result:

Integrated USB driver able to detect gadgets like Web camera, Thumb scanner and block storage devices

This Project aims to synchronize Desktop environment running on one panda board with another panda board over Wi-Fi. The project involves segmentation of the desktop using the effective algorithm and segmented information is structured in custom format. The output of the algorithm is then encoded with the help of efficient encoding method to minimize the need of network resources. The encoded output is sent over Wi-Fi using RTP towards another Wi-Fi terminal, which can decode the input data stream and appropriate display is created. All the changes in the senders display are identified and corresponding changes are transmitted so that only modified information is sent over Wi-Fi to show relative changes on receiver’s end.

Expected results:

A system using PANDABOARD that can stream complete user interface information of one unit to another display unit over Wi-Fi.

Use PANDA to create and maintain ad-hoc cloud to provide platform as a service. Today in the
era of smart phones and tablets having a hardware constraint to run any application residing in
your machine is a major drawback. So consider a scenario where you are traveling (Bus/Trains/
Flight), where there are several phones/computational devices, of which while some are highly
active, some may be totally dormant, thus wasting a lot of processing power when there is a need
for it. So having a single PANDA as a controlling device (cloud server) , all the platform could
register itself to the cloud to provide its computational capabilities (also to use), thus acting as a
CPU hot-plug to add more cores to PANDA as and when they register , thus creating an ad-hoc
cloud system dynamically without any additional resources. With good load prediction algorithm
in place, Applications can be launched in this multi-core system, without having to worry about
the device's own processing power.

< AVR On The Go >

A small, portable AVR programmer*.

*: The programmer shall have a small screen, micro keyboard, autonomous power source and ISP(6/10)pins and JTAG connections to connect with the targets.

It would be on running an embedded Linux distribution and have an environment setup for compiling C/C++ & ASM code for the AVR.

Team Graviton is a contestant in the SFE international Autonomous Vehicle Competition 2012. Our vehicle is equipped with a computer vision system in addition to high precision spatial orientation sensors. This sophisticated realtime computer vision system, artificial intelligence and blistering fast vehicle makes Team Graviton unbeatable.

The project will provide a 7" TFT LCD Screen with a resistive touch screen for PandaBoard. A plastic(ABS) frame will be included also to contain the screen and touch for easy mounting.

The main objective of this project is to build a cheap auto-focus camera using OpenCV libraries.

Specs:
- 5 MP Auto-focus camera module.
- Runs on linux with custom user interface.
- Social-oriented (Upload pictures directly to communities like Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr, etc.).
- Community based development.
- Media Player.

OpenCV is a widely used, cross-platform real-time image processing libraries. The key applications of OpenCV include Facial Recognition System, Gesture Recognition and Motion Tracking which are sufficient to provide functionalities we find in regular cameras like Face Detection, Smile Detection, image stabilization, different shooting modes (like Panorama, smile shot, continuous shots, etc.), etc.

The user has full access to code thereby allowing him to tweak the existing code or write new ones. Wrappers for languages like C#, Python, Ruby and Java are already developed. Therefore code can be written in any language. Also code written by community members can accessed and downloaded. The downloaded code can be installed in the camera. This allows the user to upgrade his camera to better functionality.

Further, this can be used as a Media Player. Also functionalities like Geo-tagging can also be implemented if the board has a built-in GPS.

This project is aimed to develop a 2 channel 50Msps 12bit DAQ system, plus 32 channel digital analyzer. Scope of this project includes both hardware and software development.

Hardware
Spartan 6 FPGA will be used to perform ADC and logic input control. ARM processor will be used to transmit data to PC through USB2.0 or Ethernet.

Software
The ARM processor will run Embedded Linux (likely Linaro). Control software on PC will be developed to generate VCD formated output. VCD data can be easily opened using waveform viewer like GTKView.