Introduction

You have a choice of what to do for the remainder of the semester: continue doing laboratory exercises that I assign to you, or work on a final project of your own choosing. I have two more exercises tentatively planned. One involves use of the touch screen and audio I/O system (use the touch screen to generate tones with different pitches), and the other involves using a library called “Pixel Streams” to manipulate video from a camera and display the result on the screen.

If you prefer to work on a project of your own choosing let me know now so we can agree on what it is that you are going to work on. There are several interesting devices that we have not explored this semester that you might be interested in working with: Ethernet, audio, video, serial I/O (RS-232), SmartMedia (flash memory), external RAM, as well as the infamous bluetooth radio. In the past students have made voice recorders, touchscreen games, a toy piano, an Ethernet link for transmitting images. Another idea would be implementation of any algorithm that can benefit from the extremely high degree of parallelism possible on an FPGA (cryptography, anyone?). But any idea you think might be interesting is fair game; it’'s just a matter of making sure you can make good progress in the few weeks remaining in the semester.