Xué review

Eric Brombaugh ebrombaugh1 at cox.net
Tue Aug 10 12:44:37 EDT 2010


Hi,

I've been taking a look at the Xué schematics and sent a few questions 
to Wolfgang which he asked me to share with the list. I read through the 
previous threads before composing this list so hopefully these are 
up-to-date.

1) How much of this has been prototyped already? Since you're planning 
to use a Spartan6 FPGA it seems it would be a great idea to test as much 
of this as possible prior to designing a board. In particular I see that 
the DRAM, USB and Ethernet interfaces appear to use IP from Lattice or 
Opencores.org and should be fairly quick to bring up on an existing 
development board. Spending a bit of cash today to prototype the system 
level components and prove them out could save a lot of board spins and 
hair pulling down the road.

2) What is the plan for power-up configuration of the FPGA? As it stands 
the schematic is unclear about this - is a SPI or parallel flash 
planned? I assume there be provisions for the soft host processor to 
update it.

3) What's the power supply going to look like? Is it POE? What is the 
estimated power requirement for the final design in Spartan 6? What type 
of regulators are planned (switchers or LDOs)? Will you use pre-built 
modules or a custom design on-board?

4) Any plans for GPIO in addition to the CIS interface? Seems that an 
ethernet-connected camera like this would be ideal in remote locations 
and providing interfaces for controlling other devices would be ideal - 
I'm particularly thinking about things like pan/tilt heads, 
zoom/aperture/focus controls on lenses, temperature sensors, etc.

Eric




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