Hi, Marc

> Did you just say you'd do boards? :-)

    I can draw the boards, spend some money to make the prototype and I can
make more boards to anyone participating at the project just for the cost of
the boards as they come from the board house. I will pay for the films and
startup fees myself. I am not sure how cheap I pay for boards when compared
to Olimex or other board houses but I can get gerbers available to anyone
and each person can use whatever board house. The main advantage is that I
will have the design debugged before other people need to invest money on
it... Besides as I am down in Brazil I will also need some help to buy the
parts and we can trade :-)

> I've been preaching a bit about FPGAs the past couple of days (sorry). You
> need the speed and predictability (important) of a hardware-oriented
> solution here. I just can't see the use of a PIC here anywhere (and am
> glad this is under [EE]: because of that).

    It may be easier to use a microcontroller, specially to make the
interface to the PC easier. The trigger has to be on the FPGA for sure... Or
if we go with low speed everything can be in the microcontroller. Have you
seem those small ARM7 parts from philips ? 32 bits at under $11 and quite
easy to interface and make work. Might be a option.. But... I am not the one
designing this beast.... It is up to the design guys to decide :-) I just
want something that can be built with easy to find parts...

> I also firmly believe a device such as this must be multifunction. A pure
> DSO is unlikely to excite folk. A 16+ channel logic analyzer is a nice
> adjunct. And stuff like function generators become pretty easy once the
> former are done.

    Agreed... A small logic analyser is quite usefull if we have the right
trigger options. Just compare trigger is a pain to work with... It would be
nice to have at least 2 level triggering capabilities.

> If can model this around Altera's Cyclone, I have enough hardware here
> right now to start doing the FPGA stuff. The Cyclone is also cheap, has
> memory interface glue and IP for free, and has a sister PROM for
> programming on startup.

    Can we get those at Digikey ?? :-) If we can I think it is a great
option.. Let's define it and start working ;-)

Best regards,
Alexandre Guimaraes



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