Blogger Blues

Blogger.com was down late last week so I was unable to post these notes and sent them to Ray and Tyler instead. Now Blogger is back up so I am posting them now!

Following is a list of major steps that need to be taken, including some new gelware components that need to be developed, and other related action items, based on the approach that we're basically going to throw away all of the programming work (Quartus gelware, LabView code) that Sachin has done and start over (instead of reverse-engineering everything):

1. Port my dual-edge-triggered carry-save counter over to the FEDM board, and experimentally determine its max frequency on the Stratix II using PLL clock drivers.
   
   
2. Instantiate a Nios system for the Stratix II, for use in firmware development.
   
   
3. Create a simple serial interface module (probably just a PIO device) to allow programming the DAC voltages in firmware, write that firmware, and test it.
   
   
4. Create input-capture circuits for measuring start/stop times of threshold crossings, with CPU interface (probably just a PIO again), and test them.
   
   
5. Develop firmware that puts together all of this data for each PMT pulse received (including the absolute time information obtained from the sync pulses), and sends it over the serial port to the server (this can use our existing EZURiO Wi-Fi modules).
   
   
6. Develop server-side code (in Python) for data analysis and visualization.
   

Items #1 and #2+3 are pretty independent of each other, so Tyler and/or the other student(s) can potentially help with (or be primarily responsible for the development of) one or both of these. Other than this, later items depend on earlier ones before they can be fully tested, but potentially the student(s) can help with these steps as well.

Overall, I think our new design will be much simpler than Sachin's, apart from its not being directly usable from LabView. But, we can always still develop a LabView interface for it if we want to (since we'll understand how it works, this should be easy to do).