HP2VGA: Project Write Up

Introduction

This project started about two and half years ago when I took an FPGA class at MIT and the professor happened to give me an HP1662AS logic analyser that MIT were throwing out. Despite the fact that I lived in the UK and this thing is massive and weighs 20kg I took it anyway. I thought it would be a cool project to replace the cathode ray tube with a larger, LCD display. I thought I would get this done before I left the US three months later… Little did I know it was going to take me another two years (although not of continuous work). Now I am nearly done, and just in time to ship it back to the US when I move back for work.

The HP1662AS on the desk where it was left for me in MIT

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Videos: I forgot which way I soldered the chip!

I was soldering a QFN-25 in flip-chip configuration and forgot which way round I soldered it… Here’s how I figured it out.

HP2VGA: PCB Design with a BGA

This PCB represents two firsts for me – first 4 layer board and first BGA package. The former isn’t really a big deal and is really just necessary because of the latter. Due to my memory requirements, I was forced to use the Lattice iCE40HX8k which has more RAM than the smaller variant, iCE40HX4k, and also only comes in BGA packages.

HP2VGA: I’ve Been Making Progress

I haven’t posted in a long time. For one thing, work has been busy. Also I have been making progress here and there in a number of ways, none of which directly merit an article. My solution is to briefly sum up all of my progress here.

Oscilloscope Mod: Decoding My First Frame

It’s been a long time since I last updated about this project, but I have been working slowly in the background. The current plan is to use a TVP7002 from Texas Instruments which is a triple 10-bit video digitiser. It is a little bit over-kill for my needs – it is able to handle three RGB video signals and I only need one monochrome video signal – but nonetheless it is an interesting chip and will achieve what I need.

Multispectral Imaging with Raspberry Pi

Last weekend I went to a meetup which was a bit like a hackathon. The title was ‘Multispectral Imaging with Raspberry Pi’. In a lot of ways I am not a fan of the Raspberry Pi – I feel that it was hyped as a great way to get kids into programming, but in reality most kids have access to full Windows PCs which they will be more familiar with and also have much more user friendly programming IDEs, tutorials etc. What interested me was the multispectral imaging, so I went along not sure what to expect.

They introduced the concept of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). This is a value indicates the health of plant life and calculate by measuring the light reflected by a plant. It is defined as:

The Atmel’s Universal Serial Interface (USI) sucks for I2C

Quick Intro to I2C

Along with USART and SPI, I2C is definitely the most common interface used by a microcontroller to communicate with peripherals. In order to implement an I2C bus all you need is two open-collector collector pins, one for the SCL (clock) line and one for the SDA (data) line.  It has to be open-collector because there are times during the protocol when two devices drive the clock line at the same time which can lead to a short circuit if one device drives it high and one drives it low. This way, the bus lines are high by default due to the pull up resistors –  if a device wants a line to go low, it just shorts it to ground via an internal transistor. There is no path from VCC to GND that does not contain a high-valued resistor.