Cornell University FPGA Class Projects for 2008 112
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?
Re:Oh, wow (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They really seem to like wikipedia. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 the library set up a few years ago but then again the school doesn't really subscribe to much technology oriented stuff so its kinda like looking for goldfish in the ocean.
Re:They really seem to like wikipedia. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Nothing Special... (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm glad Cornell can afford to pay for this Slashvertisement, but I went to a non-ivy league college 5 years ago and in our FPGA class (using Xilinx boards and VHDL/Verilog) our projects seemed much better. We picked an 8-bit nintendo game and implemented it, including wiring up a controller and outputting to a VGA monitor. Some cool ones were clones of Blades of Steel and Tecmo Bowl.
I guess the moral of the story is, my entire 4 years of tuition was less than one semester at Cornell. Yeah, it's nice to graduate college with no loans, can afford to buy a house and new car and have an equivalent education, just not an Ivy League diploma.
So freaking what? (Score:1, Insightful)
News for nerds? Hardly. Circle-jerk publicity for Cornell, home of Andy Bernard? Probably. Total waste of space? Definitely.
There are thousands of cool class projects, so why pick the frankly sub-par efforts of Cornell here? Someone blow someone who wears the right color tie today?
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]
Freshman course (Score:1, Insightful)
We have a course like this at our school, but it is for freshman only. The Altera DE2 boards are used as well, but we are not allowed to use NIOS. Instead we had to make our own architecture. I'm not too impressed with the projects on this site this semester.
I just noticed someone did a brute force attack on DES with an FPGA. How the hell is that a senior project? That's like a quick weekend project.
Re:Oh, wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Oddly enough, I watched those guys making the Tetris game while I was doing my ALU lab.
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".
Re:The usual Wikipedia vs. non Wikipedia discussio (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:The usual Wikipedia vs. non Wikipedia discussio (Score:2, Insightful)
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.