Where, oh Where did our Daddy go?

This is what Darren spent the last school year working on, I'll let him explain it:

To briefly explain, our goal was to design an Integrated Circuit (IC) to control a Wireless Digital Camera System.  The project spawned from an image sensor that one of the UofI professors designed that processed the image data faster then other competitors, yet only 1% image degradation. 

Our IC took the image data from the image sensor and sent it out of several perpherials, those being an LCD, USB, and wireless transceiver.  The transceiver transmitted the data to a receiving board and sent the data received out through USB to a PC in our demo. 

If you have questions or want further explanation, just ask.

Here I am happy to be done with Expo.

Here is the overall setup.

This is the IC we designed.  It is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).  The ASIC is the tiny square box in the center of the gold plating.  Unfortunately, somewhere between the working code and the physical layout, there was an error causing the chip to be useless.

This is the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board on the original setup when we started this project to control the image sensor to output the image data through USB.  If you look at the USB cable on the bottom of the image, you can get an idea of how large this FPGA board is.  I must admit I am still impressed that all of that fit into that tiny little square.

This is the setup that would have used the ASIC.  But, because we made sure to have a backup plan, we were able to use a much smaller FPGA to still allow us to demo our system.

Here is the working camera system inside our enclosure.

Due to the limitation of our transceiver, we were only able to transmit 3 frames per second.  Because the image sensor can do up to 60 FPS, we brought in a couple of Computer Science students to take advantage of that.  This system was working at about 35 FPS for this setup.

The CS students used a mini computer, called a Rasberry Pi, to transfer the image data to a monitor as well as setting up a webpage that could be accessed by portable devices such as the tablet above.

Here is the output to the monitor.

Here is the Raspberry Pi.

Here are the printed circuit boards (PCBs) that we designed.  The left is the receive side of the wireless transmission, the middle is the transmitter board, and the right is the transmitter board without the components installed.

Here is one side of the two layer PCB I designed.  It is the transmitter board that was able to use either the ASIC, or the small FPGA board to implement our backup plan

Here is the front side of the PCB with the components.

And here is the back side.

WE are just so proud of him and Thankful he works so hard for us, we struck gold with this guy!