[E3-hacking] E2 PBL response

Matt Evans e3-hacking@earth.li
Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:32:56 +0000


Hi Peter,


Welcome to the list!

Let me instantly diverge off-topic:

On 15 Mar 2005, at 08:55, Peter Washington wrote:

> I think that with the particular mix of people we now seem to have 
> looking at this problem we should have it licked pretty quickly.
>
> On another subject entirely, (which should probably be handled further 
> in some other forum), Ralph and I have been talking about
> home made Digital Storage Oscilloscopes recently, if either Matt or 
> David would like to join forces with us maybe we could have a
> bash at actually making something.

Me me me!  :-)  I was looking at buying one recently... even ebay 
wasn't cheap :/  I would be interested in this.  I'm also probably more 
interested in building a logic analyser, and it's something I was 
planning to try out on my Xilinx FPGA board.  These devices in 
particular should be pretty good to trace to a certain depth since the 
larger ones have a pretty reasonable amount of RAM (or spare FFs).

One of the things I was thinking of doing with the E2.... was to use it 
as the front-end to a FPGA-based logic analyser backend.  Screen size = 
pretty good.. and of course with a logic analyser the screen's mostly 
just a GUI so bus speed (16bit) shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck.

But yes I'm interested in your plans for a DSO (they may share a lot of 
common ground too).. anyone got a wiki to scribble ideas on?

[Maybe I should say my background is in CompEng, so my studies were in 
hardware/VLSI.. nothing remotely analogue though (don't say 'FET' :P ) 
so you guys sort that angle.. ;)  I have some experience with using 
FPGAs though (ideal for complex ASIC-needing homebrew projects), if 
that's useful.]


Cheers,



Matt