AXIOM Alpha Milestone Reached | apertus°

Error message

The comment you are replying to does not exist.

Submitted by Sebastian on Tue, 08/27/2013 - 09:00

It's about time

Today is a major milestone on our path to having a working Axiom Alpha prototype! After months of designing, routing, checking, double-checking and then revising our designs, we have now placed an order for the final version of the printed circuit boards (PCBs) we will be implementing in our prototype.

The Image Sensor Front End (SFE)

PCB Top Side.

PCB Bottom Side.

This 4 layer PCB will act as the bridge between our image sensor: the CMV12000 (providing a native resolution of 4096x3072 pixels - more details are available on the Axiom Minisite) and our prototyping platform - the Zedboard. Inside the FPGA, all image data taken from the sensor will be read into memory, preprocessed and then output as a video stream over HDMI.

OSH Park

Our prints are being manufactured by the kind folks at Open Source Hardware Park, which is a community-based printed circuit board (PCB) ordering service. Their business model revolves around receiving designs from a range of clients, placing them alongside one another on a combined board and then ordering the said board from a fabrication lab. This allows their customers to purchase low volume prints at very reasonable prices. The downside to this however, is that customers may have to wait for batches to fill up before their design can be sent off to the fab facility, printed and then shipped back to OSH Park. More information can be found on their website, which is also set up to allow members of this thriving community to share open hardware PCB designs quickly and with ease. But of course, our schematics and board layouts are on GitHub as well.

What's next?

With all of this said and done, we must now wait up to 4 weeks for the boards to arrive (since they are grouped into batches and we don't know exactly when one batch will fill to maximum capacity and be sent off to the factory). Once our boards arrive, we will immediately get to work populating and testing the board. Whilst you would normally plan for a second and third hardware revision to get everything into an optimised working state, we don't think there will be too many problems with our initial design. After this, we will proceed to work on the FPGA code, dealing with things like image pre-processing, data and memory management.

Things learned along the way

PMOD Debug V1.0 Bottom.

PMOD Debug V1.0 Top.

In accordance with our mission statement we have promised to share the knowledge gained throughout our development trajectory. This has now lead to our first side-product: A debug PMOD interface for FPGA development featuring 64 LEDS that can easily be interfaced from inside the FPGA (and which we are using to display "state information"). With the FPGA executing all instructions concurrently, you cannot inspect actions in a step-by-step manner and debug FPGA operations like normal code with breakpoints. As such, this LED matrix is a convenient way to visualise all the processes performed inside the FPGA with your code. We are still thinking about offering these modules fully assembled in our webshop. Let us know if you would be interested in something like this so that we may allocate our limited resources to making it happen.

Cover Photo under CC by Jeff Turner

Project:

AXIOM Alpha