Mountain Girl and I have a working prototype of our smart Hamster synchronizer. We're being very careful of it, because we need to demonstrate a working system next Tuesday. In the meantime, we have a new toy: a real printed circuit board version of our cobbled-together synchronizer. The blank boards came in this week. Today Mountain Girl put the components on them: sockets, resistors, capacitors, headers, etc. We had to do a few modifications because the layout guy missed a few ground islands, leaving some pins not connected to anything. It looks pretty slick, if I do say so myself. It plugs into an FPGA board that manages the Ethernet connections and interrupts, and the whole setup is very compact. It's shiny too.
Once we check out the power situation (we already resolved a short from power to ground) to ensure that no chips will be fried under normal operating conditions, we'll drop line drivers into the sockets and take it out for a spin. Maybe we'll even be able to use it in our Tuesday demo.
177 words | April 28, 2005 09:22 PM | Ivory tower