Monday, September 15, 2008

Processing

Have you guys seen Processing.org? they have a little compiler IDE thing that i think is a pretty front end to openGL and graphics processing, that turns into java. I was able to use to make a scope for a thing I was working on at work. it took me all of a few hours. its that simple, you guys already knew that because of how bad I am at coding. =)

I interfaced it with a 15 line program I loaded up on the arduino, which interestingly enough uses an IDE that looks identical. for a few hours of work, I have a fully functional tool that we've spent over $5,000 for at work to be built with off the shelf hardware. the kicker? Mine cost $35 for the hardware, and a few hours of code.

see the first screen shot, complete with 2 10-bit a/d inputs and one digital input (the blue sync line) running at 4 hertz. yeah, sounds slow, but try cramming 10-bit data over a 115,200 (crappy) serial rs-232 link. its possible, but it will take some work to do much better.

this was before i got my sync algorithm all figured out (which I implented on the computer side, not the hardware side). I would post the code, but unfortunatly i was at work when i wrote it, so technically that makes it theirs =(

4 comments:

Daniel said...

Why not just use a scope? Your slew rates look horrid and your accuracy on a non-realtime system is going to be pretty poor too.

Anything less than 20GS/s doesn't give us the results we need.

These guys came out and did a little advertising / teaching for us about their new ATE which looks pretty dang speedy. (I think $34 might pay for the power to turn it on once).

http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5989-8862EN.pdf

forkev said...

i'm impressed. to get a new system off the ground in less then a week with something usable is awesome. I like steep learning curves - once you know it, you can go do something useful. long learning curves tend to drag it out for weeks with nothing to show.

k2h said...

Re: Dan
I hate to break it to you, but no one in oil and gas has any idea what a giga-sample is. much of their equipment takes MINUTES to update. we've introduced earth shattering paradigm shifting technology with equipment that updates once per second. internally it runs slightly faster. in all fairness, i'm sampling much faster than 4hz, thats just the overall frame width, so it like 2khz sample or something, but yeah.. a $34 solution is really all thats needed here.

oh yeah. you care a bout slew rate because you live in the digital side of things, i care about how round the upper traces are. because we are using the analog portion of the sample.

k2h said...

now that i think about it, i wonder if i can put one of your ugly, REALLY ugly digital signals through our detection system to tell something about electron migration, or heat of the junction, or something you may have never thought about before. i'll make a note of that.