January 27, 2012
Bridging the Gap
The Real World Meets Innovation At The Avnet Tech Games
In this week’s Fish Fry, I interview Joe Tillison (Technical Director for Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas) about the upcoming Avnet Tech Games. From racing robots to a new game called “Kevin’s High-Tech Home Makeover”, Joe and I sort through the details of the Avnet Tech Games and chat about why the these games aren’t like your average high tech scholarship contests. Also this week, I dig into my mailbag and come up with a sponsorship opportunity for industrious engineers.
I have another (yes really!!) MAX V CPLD development kit courtesy of Altera to give away this week, but you’ll have to find out how to win.
Channels
Career. Embedded. FPGA. Products. Robotics.
Fish Fry Links - January 27, 2012
More information about The Avnet Tech Games (1)
More information about The Avnet Tech Games (2)
More information about Altera's MAX V CPLD Development Kit
Fish Fry Executive Interviews
John Bruggeman, Former CMO - Cadence Design Systems
Darrin Billerbeck, CEO - Lattice Semiconductor
Lauro Rizzatti, Vice President of Marketing, EVE
Bill Neifert, CTO - Carbon Design Systems
Sean Dart, CEO - Forte Design Systems
Kapil Shankar, CEO - SiliconBlue
Paul Kocher, President - Cryptography Research Inc.
Comments:
Posted on January 27, 2012 at 5:22 PM
I check out the Avnet Tech Games in this week's Fish Fry. Joe Tillison and I chat about innovation, helping those in need and how fun mentoring and teaching can be. What do you think the role of engineering mentors should be?
Posted on January 28, 2012 at 3:37 AM
If I could have a MAX V kit , I'd like to use it to build a " homemade " smart high torque servo RC "on steroids" for legged robotics applications.Via the expansion headers I could easily interface the kit to a PS2 optical mouse .
In this way I could get cartesian coordinates of the motor shaft thanks to a CD glued to the pinion of a battery operating screwdriver.
A cartesian to polar conversion would be painless thanks to the aid of Bernstein polinomials (to get the Arctg() function in stochastic arithmetic...):
http://www.cadbio.com/wiki/images/0/07/Qian_Riedel_The_Synthesis_of...
maybe a look up table approach would be viable too , thanks to the I2C on board eeprom.
Even moderately complex control architectures such as relay feedback based PID controllers could be easily fitted into the MAX V device , thanks to the adoption of stochastic computing. With a serial link via a UART (easily implementable thanks the huge amount of resources) the kit could be connected to a PC equipped with Matlab , in order to easily tune the PID , or for monitoring purposes , data plotting and so on.
With an RS485 transceiver I could build a chainable series of controllers (I need 12 servos to build my new robot , serious nerdiness is becoming quite costly nowadays , so please , consider me for a generous donation...).
A PWM controller (implemented in logic) coupled to an external H bridge would be used to control the motor of the screwdriver.
Using I2C based A/D converters interfaced via I2C master controllers (implemented in logic as well) , motor current measurements could be useful to detect dangerous motor stall conditions , or overheat conditions in the H bridge too (using for example a thermistor).
Posted on February 02, 2012 at 3:33 AM
I would start out with attaching some LEDs and implementing a knight rider like light show
Posted on February 02, 2012 at 12:40 PM
Hi Amelia,I would really like this kit and as this is the fun week I would like to use it to make a fully synchronous PinBall machine with a cycle accurate switching of multiple pins at the same time. Also to increase my luck I did send you a invitational bribe by mail q:o)