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Cornell University FPGA Class Projects for 2008
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Dec 13, 2008 10:01 PM
from the ok-dad-now-about-that-money-I-asked-for dept.
from the ok-dad-now-about-that-money-I-asked-for dept.
Matt writes "The new crop of Cornell University ECE 5760 projects are now online. Some really cool projects, as well as the previous two years' worth of projects." Since it's mid-December, many other schools, too, have either just let out or are about to; can you point to any other online collections of cool technical projects?
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Submission: Cornell University FPGA Class Projects by Anonymous Coward
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Incredibly good class (Score:3, Interesting)
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I didn't take 576, but I did take 476 from Land. I still consider it the best class I've ever taken in school, undergraduate or graduate.
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It's too bad we don't get to do these types of projects in the "real world".
I did more fun stuff in my 5 years of college than I've done in the 10 years since then. The only good news is that now my pay is better (negative $28/hour in college versus positive $50/hour at work).
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There's nothing except your own priorities from stopping you doing fun stuff as a hobby at home! I'm sure you could pick up a cheap FPGA board if that's your interest, and it's easy to do software development using free tools under both Linux and Windows.
Most jobs come with a trade off of interesting work (more rare) and good pay/commute/environment/etc. A reasonable compromise is to take the good pay/etc (gotta pay the bills), then do the fun/interesting stuff at home. You never know - you may be able to m
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Maybe this is why my former adviser suggested I go into teaching at the college level. He said when he quit industry and became a professor his pay was cut 40%, but he found his new job much more enjoyable.
They really seem to like wikipedia. (Score:2)
Does Cornell have an engineering library?
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I tried to use the library at my school (Nebraska - Omaha) and after discovering most of the books are from the 60s and 70s it turns out over half are falling apart and the other half have disintegrated long ago. It was kinda sad but then again the stuff I was looking for was all about analog power supplies and while I can imagine that the digital stuff is in better shape that is still no excuse for having unusable books. Wiki pages and Google searches also beat out the new bajillion dollar search engine
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No, we have multiple engineering libraries.
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You're right about that. What surprised me was that, with this being a graduate level course, confirming legitimate references were not also present.
I only had a chance to look at a few projects, though, before the Cornell site slowed to a crawl likely due to the Slashdot traffic. They are pretty cool.
Too bad I can't get the academic pricing on the Altera board.
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How many books are out there on FPGA development that would be in a university library?
My Physics department stopped adding to its stacks quite some time ago. Half of the library is slated to be converted into grad student offices within the next year. (Insert whine here about department not caring about undergrads)
In any event, a great majority of the books that are there aren't remotely recent (eg. 50+ years old), and are often way above the comfort level of an undergrad.
Although this seems to be genera
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Also, keep in mind that as an engineering project, the final thing that REALLY matters is:
Does it work and perform the function it was designed to do?
Cornell University IT Class Project (Score:2)
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Georgia Tech Senior Design Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academic/courses/ece4007/web/index.html [gatech.edu]
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This is what they should had done (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like they should had made a "web accelerator."
Altera DE2 Cyclone II FPGA is Great (Score:3, Interesting)
UIUC ECE Senior Design (Score:5, Interesting)
http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece445/?g=Home&p=Projects&c=Featured%20Projects [uiuc.edu]
Includes some crazy stuff like a photographing UAV, a PC-based oscilloscope, and a combination lock brute-forcer.
I'm eFamous! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in this class. I worked on the Speaker Recognition project. It was very hard. Some comments and responses to other posts:
If you have any questions about the class, I'd be happy to answer them.
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Shameless plug:
William & Mary [wm.edu] offers a very similar class [wm.edu] as an undergraduate Physics elective that I just completed.
Mirroring the parent poster's comment: "It was very hard" (damn interesting though...)
Doing something similar myself (Score:2)
Dansdata (Score:2)
has some pretty interesting projects of various kinds, both on the website and the more frequently updated blog section, he's more hardware than software though.
MIT 2.009 Product Design class, and more (Score:3, Informative)
For a slightly more holistic project approach, take a look at a MIT 2.009 Product Engineering [mit.edu] class (Mechanical Engineering dept), which now has videos from their projects for this semester: microwave fire extinguisher, self-adjusting electric cook-top array, basketball player tracking system, etc. There are also some neat projects for microcontroller beginners on the NerdKits videos [nerdkits.com] page. DIY digital scale interface over USB, morse code decoder, iPhone R/C car control, and more. (Disclaimer: I did some of the electronics design for the 2.009 Purple Team, and am one of the NerdKits team.)
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Hey there, I'm the guy that ended up designing and building the final electronics system for the Purple team. Did you get a chance to see the system I ended up doing? I was able to get some pretty good performance, reliably detecting a single infrared LED out to about 40 feet in an extremely noisy environment.
OpenCores.org (Score:3, Informative)
To answer the poster's question, the opencores.org site provides a wealth of free FPGA hardware designs.
You can find a full list of their projects here [opencores.org].
The usual Wikipedia vs. non Wikipedia discussion. (Score:4, Insightful)
A disclaimer: i hold a phd degree in physics and am working in research. When i studied, libraries were still the most common way to acquire knowledge, so i am biased.
However, i observe the following thing: AFAIR Wikipedia itself says it is not meant to be a "first source". Wikipedia can give you hints where to search in detail, and for sure that *is* great. However, a citation in a paper or your report serves two purposes:
a) make your work understandable for the reader (being nice to the reader)
b) give credit to the original author (being nice to the original author)
c) make clear what you have done/not done (being nice to yourself by specifically avoiding to be accused of scientific misconduct)
The traditional approach is that general text books should seldom be cited, and if so, very specifically. To me, if a student cites a specific wikipedia page the latter condition is fulfilled. So if a reasearch group somewhere on the world used FPGAS in a certain way, it is fair to cite their works and not an wikipedia article which was written from an enthousiast about an article which cooked the results of that group down in an popular science journal. However i suggest, if the wikipedia version is well written, to insert a sentence in the introductory part of the report like "Technique x using y is now widely researched and review reports and intodudory materials are commonly available [a,c,b]", which [a,b,c] beeing wikipedia, a textbook or something (not that you may put several references in a single citation). If it helped you, it can be mentioned. Dont however mention textbook knowledge which is expected from you and your peers.
The following things should be kepti in mind:
a) anything referring to a standard should carry the standards official publisher in the reference
Bad example: cite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11 [wikipedia.org] for the standard instead of the standard itself. *However* iff the article on wikipedia contains additional information like ABOUT the standard and you want to mention this informally in a meta-sentence (e.g. "IEEE 801.11 is seen by the broad public as the only WLAN standard [quote to wikipedia]"), then it is for sure allowed.
b) dont fall for the illusion that wikipedia is faster than the scientic journals. i assure you its not. In the subjet i work, wikipedia is at least 4 years behind the *published* knowledge and understanding.
c) Wikipedia tends to be good for general knowledge and bad for specific in depth-knowledge. The theory behind the subject i am researching in mentioned only on the surface, but even the context with some papers from the beginning of the *last* century is missing (i'll add it when i find time).
So all in all: Saying to a student: "start at wikipedia" might be ok. One should also say "but follow the threads".
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a) English is not my native language, and English punctuation is hard.
b) this was not a critical of anything specific, just my view on the wikipedia discussion, which sadly boils down to ideological wars sometimes (and does so here in other threads).
c) for sure typing a 5 minutes comment in slashdot has lower standards on capitalization and punctuation than a submitted comment on a paper.
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Don't worry about it, the guy you're replying to is clearly just an asshole who feels vastly inferior to you and is trying to make up for it somehow.
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+1 for correct usage of iff
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Interesting comment, but I find something odd: for someone who purports to be a PhD researcher, your style is decidedly crude.
It's a PhD in physics, not English grammar. Also, punctuation has little to do with scholarship, which is what GP discusses. I hold a PhD and can write circles around 99% of my colleagues, but I focused on the content and not the style of the GP post, so I didn't notice the lowercase "i"s, etc. Time to graduate from your middle school mindset, kid.
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someone who purports to be a PhD researcher, [...] using capitalization and punctuation correctly
I think you're mixing up physics and linguistics ;)
Stanford CS 229, Machine Learning, projects (Score:4, Interesting)
I just saw the poster presentations from CS 229 [stanford.edu], Machine Learning, at Stanford. The current batch of projects aren't on line yet, but the ones from previous years are.
The projects were very impressive. A vision-guided autonomous helicopter. A system for separating out instruments and vocals from existing audio. A CAPTCHA solver. De-blurring of out of of focus images. Flower recognition. Recognition of hostile network traffic. And those were just a few of the projects. Machine learning really works now.
Nefarious device (Score:2, Funny)
I was disappointed by "All Digital, FPGA Based, Lock-in Amplifier". I was imagining the following scenario:
Grunt: Sir, we're rapidly loosing market share to Apple and Linux.
Ballmer: Engage the lock-in amplifier. Muhahahaha.
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Yeah, but this is Cornell. Shitty programs from Cornell are more news worthy than shitty programs from other places because the shitty programs from Cornell have a brand name label.
Re:Oh, wow (Score:4, Informative)
Not all of them are trivial Tristan Rocheleau's lock-in amplifier project is not something I'd expect to see from an undergrad.
Parent
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Graduate-level? Why? I would congratulate the students on nice projects if this were their first hardware course, but they seem too simple for graduate students.
At Cal, we have an undergraduate course with a project of similar complexity for a given timeframe (CS 150). The only reason for the length is to become acclimated to FPGA design.
Once you get past the basics, you can do interesting projects. This semester, six undergraduates (including myself) worked on some much larger projects--a SPARC CPU, a G
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Oddly enough, I watched those guys making the Tetris game while I was
Re:Oh, wow (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's true that it's possible to mathematically prove many pieces of software to be correct (heh, or to mathematically prove them incorrect, as would be the case with most software out there), it's pretty rarely done. To be fair, it's incredibly difficult with most non-trivial programs, of course.
But there's something incredibly satisfying and elegant about having a hardware design that you can prove is correct.
Now, of course, many other things can horribly break that design (yay for analog effects, process deficiencies and defects, etc.), but that's a far cry from "well, it compiles, so it'll probably work." But that's reality for ya.
Parent
Re:Wasted CPU Cycles (Score:4, Funny)
Or the FPGA implementation of a bouncing breasts simulator.
Parent
Re:Wasted CPU Cycles (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
College Projects (Score:2, Insightful)
More can be found here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=college+thesis+project&btnG=Search [google.com]
Re:Wasted CPU Cycles (Score:5, Funny)
For those that don't know, trepanation is a medical procedure (of dubious value) where a hole is drilled in the skull to relieve pressure, although in this case, someone may have defecated in the opening instead. It's not clear if this is an insult (implying "shit for brains", so to speak), if the poster is concerned about illegal, unlicensed, and unsanitary medical procedures taking place, or if the poster is seeking someone to perform this procedure.
Parent
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Yeah, all FPGA toolchains are pretty much the same. I went through a course at Berkeley that used Xilinx, and at work we're a Xilinx shop, but I've tried out Altera and Lattice toolsets and found them to be very similar. The big differences are when you get down to nitty-gritty timing and area constraints, but those are tied to low-level architecture, and in a intro class that's not something you need to worry about.
All FPGA manufacturers offer a free version of their tools, so the price argument is moot.
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I should add, though, that Altera's Nios and Xilinx's Microblaze do represent a form of vendor lock-in. They're heavily marketed and the results are starting to show, I guess.