The past few weeks have been interesting, to say the least. At work, I managed to put together a working timer to control the DAQ for my detector, but I am still trying to see how fast I can push it. I'm aiming for 1 microsecond time resolution, which doesn't seem impossible, but relies enitrely on how fast Xilinx has made their standard input/output commands. The bottleneck for speed lies in that it will take a finite amount of time to read in each of the pixel's scalars, and I need to find out what time that is.

Without realizing it, I implemented functionality within my timer firmware to allow for exactly this. I'm both excited and made nervous by this. If the read time is really slow, rather than use an embedded processor, I might have to implement everything directly in hardware language. I *think* I would be able to do the ethernet controller this way, but I'm fairly certain it's unfeasible to write a DDR memory controller.

If it's not fast enough I may have to look into setting up a dual core system, or using a kernel or something.

Now that the code is compiled, it's off to the lab I go.