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.
3.09.2010
3.05.2010
VERITAS in action.
T3 in all her glory.
It blows my mind how bright the moon is, regardless of long exposure times.
3.03.2010
2.19.2010
CAMAC
I've been getting the task of getting this new piece of data acquisition hardware running. It's like the VME bridge I worked on this summer, but it is for the CAMAC standard, which is a bit trickier. It's a bit of a nice change, though, because I've hit a bit of a snag in my FPGA project. I'm working on timing my data acquisition, and I've run into this weird communication error between software and firmware... Later today I'm going to set up in the lab and try dome debugging routines I wrote.
In other news, last night I bottled a pilsner beer I made about a month ago. It's bottle conditioning at the moment (ie, aging and carbonating) and should be ready to drink in two weeks or so. Tonight I have to bottle a raspberry blonde I made (with 2kg of raspberries!), and tomorrow I need to go buy the yeast for a few beers I want to make tomorrow-- a Belgian Trappist Tripel, some mead (honeywine), and a blond ale that I'm going to brew with some apricot extract for flavoring.
Bottling all of this is going to be a royal pain due to the fact that most of the bottles I have accumulated over time were never washed by their donors, so I need to do some work to get them clean... But I've got at least two weeks of fermentation time between now and having to bottle the first of the three beers I just named (likely to be the apricot ale as it's going to have the lowest amount of fermentable material in it. I've also got a big bag of grain that was slated to be for a Moosehead clone that needs to be used.... Perhaps I'll do it just for the sake of trying another lager.
Back to work now. Finally found the CAMAC documentation page I was looking for.
2.16.2010
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