With a good portion of the semester left for the project, the expectation is to do something that is much bigger then any one of the MPs. You may use componets from your past work, but that should not be the majority of your work.

Using new components of the XUP board is looked well upon. Remember that you have limited space for storage (~1MB externally) so anything you do will have fit with that constraint. We have USB boards but they only allow the XUP board to be a client, not a host. There are other limitations with the components on the XUP that you will have to read about.

Some of the major points to remember are:

• Project has to involve new components of the XUP board
• Project must interface with a CPU (iPAQ, PPC core, external processor)
• Project software side can not be larger then hardware side

Below are a few examples of some of the projects of the past. Some worked, some didn't. This is a list of projects attempted.

• MP3 Player -
  Move MP3 files from the iPAQ to the XUP, decode them and play them back using the XUP audio chip
  
• XUP-GUI -
  This project involved pre synthesising some fpga kernels. Ontop of this the group built a GUI accepting keyboard and mouse inputs along with a selection window for running one of the kernels.
• Dance Dance Revolution -
  Render the entire game on the screen, i.e. arrows, background, scoring. Couple it with the music (laptop) and use some sort of inputs to get the game going.
• Network Storage -
  Use the built in LAN components to monitor the network and store data on the XUP board.
• PAC-MAN -
  The entire game built and run on the FPGA on the XUP. Background, AI, everything.
• MPEG2 Enc/Dec -
  Based off of MP3. Capture the video from the camera and encode it as mpeg2 in real time. Also have a decode option for stored videos. Interface using serial port to controlling laptop.
• Network Packet Sniffing -
  Using the the LAN port build a packet sniffer which grabs and analyzes the packets going across 2 connections (involve the iPAQ)
• Message Hiding -
  This one involved the audio chip. As data is being processed, each byte gets a few bits stripped off and a message is inserted. On the other end, the message is rebuild from the bits in each byte.
• Duck Hunt -
  Another game on the fpga. We had some old Nintendo guns that were used for this. Again, AI and background must be drawn using the FPGA

Those are some of the projects. Almost anything in the lab is a fair game for things to use. You can check the closets to see if you want to use anything there (mostly old hardware). You are welcome to bring in external devices, but just remember that security of your items is your own responsibility.