Sweet new stuff

Hey y'all:

It has been a little while since I've posted, but the world does not stand still! ;) Yesterday I learned about two crazy new things: 1. FPGA soft core processor architecture/flexibility and 2. the new mechanical circuit element -> the inerter!

Okay, okay... here's the skinny: FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a technology that has been gaining popularity and acceptance and is being used increasingly in a lot of different applications. Essentially, it is a completely programmable digital chip that allows you to program it with whatever you want and it becomes that! Y'know how in the Transformers movie the robots could transform to be a bunch of different things? This is the digital equivalent! ;) You can quite litterally say, "computer, I would like you to be a 16 core processing powerhouse with a custom processor that I am giving you the schematics for... now how cool is that? It's like having the blueprints for a machine and then magically handing them to a device that builds itself! Here is a typical block diagram of an FPGA with an embedded processor (Nios II) and some peripherals... everything inside the box can be totally changed the next day!





I've known about these badboys for awhile, but yesterday I learned some key new things: 1) the newest versions that have come out recently have enough logic resources to implement something like 700 cores! (though there aren't enough pins to support the input and output... for 700 cores) 2) while I would have thought that since this is a digital chip, I could not use it for things like D2A (Digital to analog conversion) and A2d (Analog to digital conversion), but I was happily wrong again! There is an implementation called Sigma Delta conversion that can use 1-bit at very high speed to convert between analog and digital and back again. All else that is needed is a filter on the other end... The implication of this is staggering: Let's just say that I am making an embedded system here in 2009, and I decide that I want to make a system that has two processors cores and 4 D2As and 4 A2Ds plus some other peripherals like timers and what communications links... then in several years, I realize, "Hey, what we really need our twice as many D2As, and another type of communications link, but one of my previous comm links has become obsolete... no problem! All I have to do is reprogram the chip and my wish is granted! It's like christmas any time you want!

The second part was about the "Inerter" (Shown below)



The idea is essentially to make a mechanical equivalent to the capacitor (or inductor, depending on which analogy you use). Springs store potential energy, right? you push a spring together and it "stores" that energy to push you back later. This device "stores" kinetic energy so that if you start it moving, it wants to continue moving along that course. What is cool about this is that it was recently used in Formula 1 racing and the car that had this technology in its suspension won the race! Very cool stuff. We might be able to use this on Case Machine (The new six-wheeler machine). It also allows software to have a little more freedom in how to optimize your suspension! For example, I could model whatever vehicle we're talking about, then give Matlab a starting point and ask it to optimize given certain criteria like, "Make the road soft inside the car" and "give me good control on the ground for steering and braking". Super cool stuff. Here is a diagram of how they used it as an anti-roll (the red part in the middle of the frame).

More to come here, this is just the beginning. I'll maybe go into a little more detail on some of this if someone wants me to, but this post is getting a little long so I'll leave it at that. Catch ya later.