cospan wrote:
Just stumbled upon this site, very impressive work!
This sounds like a really fun board, Are you planning on using an external programmer to download the bit image into the FPGA or are you going to use a SPI Flash programmer? If you plan to go with the SPI Flash programmer have you looked into FTDI's FT2232H, or the bigger sister FT4232H they offer a wider variety of communication methods between a host computer and an FPGA. For example on my smallest FPGA devboard
http://wiki.cospandesign.com/index.php?title=Dionysus I use the FT2232H to both program and communicate with the board. It also allows me to communicate with the board at a rate of about 25MB/s. If you are interested I even have some HDL (Verilog) and Python scripts that facilitate communication between the host and FPGA.
This is great because you can stream video to/from the FPGA (albeit at a little slower rate at higher definition) but you can verify the video output/input pipeline even if the other video input/output functionality is not working. Here's an example of project I did that accomplished video output with an LCD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLlUxiCfyig. I need to make a video of using my small camera board but regardless video input is also possible with that chip.
Is it possible to share a block diagram of your project? I'd like to see it at a high level. I use this tool
http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_download.html to create block diagrams of my projects to share with clients, in my opinion it creates very professional looking block diagrams that really help people get the high level idea of my designs.
I look forward to seeing how everything turns out.
Dave
Dave thanks for the heads up on FTDI's FT2232H/FT4232H, and I would be interested in your drivers. I probably won't need them for awhile though. I'll PM you my email...
I was originally planning on sending data in RGB bitmap form, for simple bitmaps or sprites, through a FTDI230X. I had used a similar product in another project, although different manufacturer, the MCP2200 USB to UART. I was able to reliably transfer data files using the br@y terminal from the PC to project @ 1Mbps. This IC you mention may add alot. I will investigate!
In this part of the project for the K1 Board, I am taking a different angle than you, by using an HDMI receiver for the HD video streaming. I really just wanted to be able to connect my 14MP camera with 24X optical zoom & its mini-HDMI output to K1 and see it work on my system...
I am still doing a final writeup for this board, but there will be block diagrams included for this board as well the entire system interconnect.