Hi everyone,
My name's Matt and I'm a maker over here at Intel in Oregon. I'm spearheading a new Galileo shield to promote a cool new technology on the Quark that allows for several orders of magnitude improvement in time synchronization over a network. Here's a quick Wiki page covering the basics: Precision Time Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
With this level of synchronization between devices, there are endless nifty audio, video, location and other projects that can be done. We've thought of a few so far, but we thought it'd be even better give the maker community the tools to go out and develop their own projects using time synchronization.
Therefore, I'm in the early planning stages of developing a possible shield for the Galileo that will enable users to take advantage of the time synchronization technology on Quark by providing a bunch of sensors and other devices to help get you going.
For sensors and I/O devices, here are some of our current ideas:
- Speaker
- Microphone
- Ultrasonic receiver/transmitter
- Accelerometer
- Magnetometer
- Temperature Sensor
- Pressure Sensor
- IR Sensor
- Clock and 1MHz counter (for timestamping)
- Camera (possibly Motion JPEG)
Since many of the serial interface speeds (I2C/SPI/etc…) are limited on the Galileo based on the I/O expander (see https://communities.intel.com/message/207619), we thought it’d be cool to hook all the sensors to IOs on a cheap FPGA to give you the fastest possible connection. We’d also wire up all the remaining IOs to headers for all your future project needs J
On the other end, the FPGA would talk to the Galileo over the mini-PCIe link on the bottom through a flexible cable. This allows you to take advantage of the speed of the PCIe interface. Once you load the code into the FPGA for the PCIe and other sensor interfaces, there would still be plenty of room to code up your own RTL for making use of the space in the FPGA.
This is merely a concept at this point; there’s no potential order date yet, we’re all here just brainstorming right now.
What do you think? Do you have other suggestions for sensors/IO devices? Other stuff (LEDs, buttons, etc…) that you’d like to see on this board?
I’m a maker at heart, and I believe that the best way to make a useful shield for everyone is of course to ask the makers, so give me your input and let’s see what we can come up with!
Thanks for taking the time to read and chime in!
Matt